Known Associates
by Halfpenny
Summary: If Richard had to put his finger on it, it was more like he was a costly experiment Conan was expecting something specific from, and he wasn't delivering very promising results.
1. Chapter 1

_English names used this time around because R.B Elliott will always be the voice of Kogoro in my head. _Location is still Beika, Japan-ish, making this choice extra nonsensical.__

 _ _ _Rated as always for language and chain-smoking amnesiac detectives.___

 _ _ _.___

 ** _In which Richard tries to figure out if this is what his new 'normal' is supposed to feel like._**

* * *

.

There was a bevy of cars clustered outside the detective agency. Thumbing through the cab fare and already looking forward to assaulting his liver with his liquor cabinet, Richard spared only a brief glance at them even as Rachel craned her neck to look out the window. "Dad," she said, then flapped an urgent hand over her shoulder at him when he didn't react fast enough. "Dad, _look_."

"I see it," he said boredly, not looking. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Conan clamber up on the seat to follow her gaze. Rachel's skinny body had acted as a one-girl armada between them during the ride home, making sure a bent knee or pointed elbow stayed between the boy and Richard's intention to shove him out of the moving car. "Probably a dead body or something."

"That's not funny," Rachel snapped, reminding him that she was seventeen and shaken by the day's events, and probably temporarily qualified for gentler parenting. "It looks like they're waiting for something."

 _Or staring at a dead body._ He hoped the fact they were so close to the apartment was a coincidence and not indicative of the body's location. At the moment he felt so disconnected that it wouldn't surprise him if the body was actually his. This entire cab ride could all be a part of his cosmic limbo, and Richard was cursed to spend eternity trying and failing to count out cab fare while his daughter assaulted him with the supersonic pitch of her whining. "Probably some famous person stopped to get a coffee and someone alerted the paparazzi. You got any change? I'm short."

Eyes still trained on the mass of blinking lights on the road ahead of them, Rachel rooted around in her pocket. Conan ended up being faster. A handful of coins came out of the pocket of his trousers and was plunked into Richard's hand, and then Conan was right back to rubbernecking alongside her.

Richard took a moment to eyeball him, wondering if the kid was patronizing him, but Conan seemed to think nothing of the transaction. "Wow, that's channel 8," he said unexpectedly, gesturing until Rachel followed his gaze. "Maybe you're right. Something big has to be going down. Do you think it's a TV star?"

"It could be," Rachel said doubtfully, but her expression had brightened a little at the prospect. "I wonder if it's anyone I know?"

Richard spent the weirdest moment of his life hovering between the instinct to not take a first-grader's money and his earlier intention to kill a first-grader on the highway. In the end, evil won out over decency. He sorted Conan's change out with his own money, wondering how much of the excess he could pocket without being despicable. Probably at least half. "Hey, you want me to still pull up to the stop?" the cab driver called back to them.

"A block back would be fine. Rachel, get the brat ready."

Rachel's head finally turned so she could fix him with a gimlet eye. "The brat's name is Conan, and he can get himself ready just fine, Dad."

He rolled his eyes and sorted a tip into his pile, then tapped the cab driver on the shoulder. The driver took the assortment of bills and change and thumbed through them expertly even as he pulled over to the curb. "Everybody out," Richard announced, expertly elbowing the kid in the head as he scooted himself out the door around him. The displacement of warm and cold air brought in a swirl of snowflakes to sprinkle the backseat.

Absent-mindedly scuffing his heels against the sidewalk to test it for friction, Richard straightened out of the cab and took a second to crick the hell out of his back. Once he'd sorted himself out, he bent and stuck a hand inside for Rachel to take.

He half-expected her to ignore the gesture, but he felt her hand settle in his a moment later. It was small and cold despite the heat of the cab, fingers painfully thin in his grip.

He paused despite himself. "I'm okay, Dad," Rachel said, reading into his expression with her mother's terrifying accuracy. "I'm just tired."

"Hey, I know that," he said, and kept a firm hold on her as he pulled her out of the cab, waiting until she fully straightened before he let go. He then shut the door, gave a friendly wave through the window to the cab driver, and knocked on the roof of the car briskly to send it on its way.

" _Dad._ " Rachel lunged towards the door and yanked it open, revealing a surprised Conan still on his hands and knees on the seat. "Come here, Conan," Rachel said, exasperated. "It's all right. I won't let him do anything to you."

With a glance at Richard, Conan crawled forward and took her hand. Annoyed, Richard dug into his pocket for a cigarette to pass the time, and without really intending to caught Conan wincing a bit as he maneuvered his bruised body out of the cab.

Richard's fingers stalled on the cigarette. He shoved his hands back in his pockets irritably and forced himself to count to ten. "There," Rachel said fondly as she straightened Conan up. "You've had a long day, haven't you? I bet you'll feel a lot better after a bath."

"I don't know if we're even going to be able to get in." Conan was already on his tip-toes, peering into the crowd. "Look, they're right in front of our door. And there's _tons_ of them. Something big must have happened."

"Yeah," Rachel said. Richard felt her hand reach up to slowly wrap around his elbow. "Dad, the coffee shop is right there. You… you don't think—"

"What, that the old bat died? Give me a break." Richard didn't bother stifling his yawn as he moved forward, moving quickly enough that he felt her stumble. "There's no way I've earned enough karma for thatChristmas present. C'mon, brat, you too. Move it or get locked out."

There was a barrier of nosy spectators to work through before they even breached the ring of the reporters. Richard offered a mandatory 'excuse me' up to the universe before he bowling-balled the rest of the way, making sure he elbowed enough to make room for his kid. Lights were ricocheting off the windows of the shop, combining with the noise of the crowd to raise a spike of pressure under Richard's skull.

 _Booze._ He sleepily slapped a man in the back of the head and heard Rachel apologizing frantically in his wake. He adjusted his grip on her arm when he felt her being jostled and annoyed himself by wondering if she was keeping a grip on Conan. A few more steps and they'd be in the clear. _Booze and bed._ Or maybe booze and office couch. It depended on how much parenting Rachel needed tonight. With any luck she'd knock herself out with a hot bath while he floated away on a soothing wave of alcohol poisoning.

He was nearly to the staircase of the agency when someone shouted, " _There he is!_ "

The bulk of the crowd suddenly shifted. Richard barely had time to react before the night exploded into flashing lights and a flurry of shouted questions.

He felt Rachel gasp in fear and moved on instinct. He pushed her ahead of him, scooped Conan up and tossed him squalling into the stairwell after her, then turned and braced himself across the entrance to prevent the reporters from gaining further access. For a while the world became an impenetrable barrier of microphones and shouted questions he couldn't parse. " _Detective Moore._ " From somewhere near the middle of the throng, a man's voice finally soared above the rest. "Detective, is this the agency responsible for locating and retrieving CEO Tanner's missing daughter Michelle?"

"Uh," Richard said. He felt Rachel straining to look over his shoulder and gave her an impatient whack with his heel to keep her back. She immediately retaliated with a sharp kick to his calf that nearly broke his leg in two. "What?" he wheezed, surreptitiously trying to take his weight off of it while maintaining his manly and forbidding presence.

A second voice – female, closer this time – was the next to rise above the fray. "Is it true that the child's initial kidnapping was part of a ruse? If so, how did you uncover the kidnapper's true intentions? What would you say was their motive?"

Utterly taken aback, Richard could only continue to flounder as the questions flooded in from the sea of reporters. _How often does this agency process these types of high-profile cases. Have you worked or do you plan to work as a consultant for Beika PD. Do you see this as a potential recurring problem in affluent families. What safeguards should these families take to prevent these situations in the future._

A man's question was shouted close enough to him to jar him from his stupor. "Can you confirm for the record that you _are_ Detective Richard Moore, and that the Moore Detective Agency was responsible for solving the abduction case of Michelle Tanner, daughter of CEO Tanner from Tanner Enterprises?"

He felt Rachel's fingers gripping the back of his jacket. For a split second, because he really just kind of wanted them all to piss off so he could get wasted, Richard strongly considered lying. It wouldn't get rid of them forever but it'd probably confuse them enough to leave for the night. Richard could have some time to decompress before they found their way back to the agency, having at that point done enough research to know that he was a lying sack that sent them on a wild goose chase because he didn't feel like answering questions.

Then his narcissism kicked in, and he remembered, _Yoko Okino watches the news._ "Dad," Rachel whispered urgently as the moment stretched.

The throng had momentarily quieted to listen for his answer. Richard Moore blinked up at the sky for a while, wondering if the cameras were getting his good side. He wondered if he had a good side. "Yeah, that was me," he said, and recoiled when the world burst into a flurry of fresh questions and eye-gouging flashes of light, and that was apparently all it took for life to change forever.

* * *

So the fact was that yes, the CEO's daughter's kidnapping was a fake and the second one was real, but more importantly, _he had_ _solved a case_ , so none of the other things strictly mattered. Richard Moore lived his life in broad strokes. Solving cases was good, so that meant he should feel good. When Rachel asked him in the taxi on the way home if Conan could stay with them, Richard was too drunk on Good to say 'hell no', because why not. What was one more stupid reckless thing.

The euphoria faded around the time Conan was asleep on the floor in Richard's room, and the problem returned to Richard with the suddenness of a fist to the face. Namely, there was a strange kid covered in bruises camped out in his house, and the acceptable time to report it had long since passed, making Richard a kidnapper and probably a raging pervert.

Richard dealt with the problem by alternately blackening his lungs with cigarettes and picking up his office phone to dial the police. Each time his finger stopped just above the keypad. The issue was really less about the kid's condition and more about why Richard had waited so goddamn long to do something about it. A few hours would've been excusable, because Richard had been busy solving things. A sleepover? Even if he escaped the likely jail time, his reputation was shot.

He hung up a sixteenth and final time, then brought out his best liquor and got three glorious shades of shitfaced instead. He woke up draped across his desk the next morning, a civil war in his head and a can of beer slobbering out over his paperwork. The blinds were closed behind him, a single, searing blade of light coming through one of the broken slats.

He could hear the distant sounds of Rachel preparing breakfast on the floor above him. Head on his desk, Richard listened as a second set of footsteps made their way from one corner of the floor above him to the other. A silence of around four beats, and then the pitter-patter sounded again, this time on the stairs leading down to the office. The door creaked, and Conan called in, a little tentatively, "Uncle? Are you awake?"

 _Uncle._ Without taking his forehead from his desk, Richard reached for his gun. As his fingers hit air, a couple of things came back to him in non-specific order: he hadn't kept a gun at his side for seven years, killing himself wasn't appropriate with children under his roof no matter how obnoxious said children were, and also, kind of extremely belatedly, _oh, yeah. I can do detective things now._

* * *

 _._

He spent the next two days in cosmic dissonance, signing Conan up for elementary school while casting his net out over the city to try to foist him off on somebody. Weirdly, it was the kid's relationship to Agasa that turned out to be the most helpful. Agasa was apparently a long-time grant writer for the district and had a good reputation with the administration. Some pulled strings and greased wheels later, Conan was successfully enrolled at Teitan Elementary and scheduled to attend the following Monday.

Richard was caught between wondering how he got saddled with some random kid's academic expenses and wondering if Rachel had actually brought home a sewer mutant in the shape of some random kid. He'd seen Conan's entry test scores, and while there was a lot of mystery surrounding Conan in general, there was nothing mysterious about those numbers. They were stupidly high. The bar on the graph representing Conan's test in comparison to his peers had popped off the page like a middle finger. Agasa had probably helped speed things along, but Richard had a strong hunch that the school would've been willing to overlook a lot more weirdness to get their hands on that kind of potential.

Aware that he was dealing with something outside his psychological pay grade, Richard threw himself into the investigation. The name 'Conan Edogawa' didn't turn up anything by itself, but he hadn't expected it to. If the kid was smart enough to ace his entrance exams after blunt force trauma, he was smart enough to hand a pseudonym to a PI.

At a loss, Richard spent some unpleasant hours rifling through recent missing children cases, but distaste for the project and more pressing work around the office kept putting it on back burner. He was yanked from the task entirely on the third day when Yoko Okino found her way into his agency, wringing her hands over something about phone threats or stalkers, and to be honest he didn't do a lot of listening after that because _Yoko Okino was in his agency asking for his help._ He floated his way through the case on a package of vending machine crackers and about a bucket of libido. _This_ is what being a detective was about. Famous women asking famous detectives to solve soon-to-be-famous crimes. He had no idea how she'd thank him for catching the bad guy, but he had to assume it'd involve autographing his abs while he autographed things above her abs. As long as he could just identify the suspect, everything would be just —

He awoke with a cigarette searing his fingers and Meguire yelling in his face. "—newfound respect for you, Moore," Meguire beamed.

If this headache were anywhere near the pain of childbirth, Richard had some phone calls to make to his wife. "What did I do again?"

Meguire had twisted over his shoulder to yell to one of his officers. At this he turned back, still grinning. "What's that?"

He saw Rachel chatting animatedly with Yoko in the background. "What did I do?"

"Good one." Meguire laughed heartily and slapped his shoulder. "I gotta hand it to you, Moore, I didn't know you had it in you. You're really something else."

Richard excused himself while they were wrapping up the crime scene to throw up generously in the bathroom. During the taxi ride home, he listened with half an ear as Rachel chattered in the background, watching the snow soften the neon lights outside the window into a surreal blur. He didn't lift from his daze until Rachel nudged his shoulder. "We're home, Dad."

The meter was clicking on the dashboard. "You go on ahead," he said.

"What?" Conan was already standing on the sidewalk, shivering in his jacket. Halfway out of the cab herself, Rachel turned back to regard him suspiciously. "Why?"

"I'm going out."

"Dad, come on, it's getting late." To her credit she managed to look more concerned for him than reproachful, which was a large part of why he lived with her and not her irritating mother. "Don't you think you should get some rest? It's been a long day. You can always go out and drink tomorrow."

"Hey, the night's still young for the over-twenty crowd," he said. "Put the brat to bed and don't wait up. If you're a good girl and don't give Daddy any crap, there might be some dessert in it for you."

"Dessert, huh." Rachel looked like she was waffling somewhere between fresh suspicion and hereditary gluttony. She slid out the rest of the way, bracing herself on the hood of the car and ducking her head to peer in at him. "Are you sure this is a good idea? You really don't look like you feel up to partying."

"Look, in case you haven't noticed, the meter's running. Unless you feel like paying for that out of your allowance, shut your trap and let me do my thing. I'll be back in a couple of hours."

Rachel hesitantly let go of the roof. "Get a cab if you're going to drink," she said sternly. "I mean it, Dad. Don't try to walk home. It's freezing outside. And if you get into trouble, call someone."

"Got it, got it." He waved her off boredly. "Shut the door. You're letting out all the heat."

With palpable reluctance, Rachel obeyed. Richard watched her take Conan's hand and climb the stairs to the agency. She looked over her shoulder as she unlocked the door, meeting his gaze through the windows. He flapped another hand at her lazily. Rolling her eyes, she ushered Conan inside, shutting the door behind them.

Richard had the cab take him to the hospital. After about two hours of poking, they diagnosed a mild concussion and spent time giving him noise about it while some brat screamed about his broken arm in the exam room to his right. "I'm worried that you don't remember what clocked you," the doctor said bluntly, staring hard at the printout of his dented, crime-solving head. "I think we should keep you overnight."

"C'mon, all I need to know is if I'm bleeding into my brain or not." Mostly he was just satisfied to know that he _had_ been hit by something, because random blunt force trauma was a lot easier to explain than random blackouts. Plenty of people in his life wanted to hit him: it's why he'd taken up Judo in primary school. Getting hit from inside was something a black belt didn't cover. "If I'm not and we're all good here, would you mind wrapping this up? I'm missing the Torrential Hearts marathon."

As an early Christmas present, it turned out he wasn't bleeding into his brain. He ended up getting home well after midnight with a prescription painkiller, three tired slices of twenty-four hour diner pie, and an extra case of beer he'd purchased for medicinal purpose.

Rachel, disobeying orders because she was Eva's child, was pacing around in his office waiting for him as he came trudging up the stairs. She looked dead on her feet but perked up enough to give him attitude, shoving him over to his desk chair as he tumbled in through the door. "Daddy's fine, pumpkin," he said, goofy with fatigue and mild brain damage. "Look, he even brought dessert!"

"I've been worried sick," she snarled, snatching the bag away. "First Jimmy up and disappearing, then you staying out all hours of the night – I've had it with everyone getting to do whatever they want to do and leaving _me_ to clean up the mess. Did you at least eat while you were out?"

"No," he laughed.

She rage-devoured her slice of pie and shoved his own slice down his throat before he could get away. It was easily the dumbest thing he could do to get wasted, so he settled for a compromise, slicing through his sobriety with a brisk, surgical application of beer until he felt he could sleep the rest of the evening off.

He dozed off fully-clothed at his desk, vaguely aware of Rachel taking up vigil nearby. He was with-it enough to wonder about the strangeness of her behavior, but a combination of exhaustion and alcohol kept him from leading by example and heading up to bed himself. Later, in the dead of the night, he thought he heard the phone ring and her answer it, but he drifted back off to sleep before he could make heads or tails of the conversation.

By the next day the office phone was ringing off the hook. Looking tired but inexplicably upbeat, Rachel answered every call while Richard sprawled across one of the sofas with a cold cloth over his eyes, trying to figure out how to kill himself without getting up. "You really ought to start taking these interviews, Dad," Rachel said, hanging up for the ninth time since breakfast. "Or at least some cases. Just because you're famous now doesn't mean you get to slack off."

"Who were you on the phone with last night?" he mumbled.

She audibly paused, the scribble of her message-taking hesitating. Richard let his head drop to the side, peeling back a corner of the cloth to eyeball her. "Nobody," she said, a blush rising to her face under his scrutiny. "It was just Jimmy."

"Just Jimmy, huh." The light felt like a gunshot to the head. He let the cloth drop again. "And did Just Jimmy have anything to say for himself?"

"He said…" she hesitated again, then finished firmly, as though she were convincing herself, "that he's coming home really soon."

Richard spent most of the day thinking about the various methods he could use to ship Kudo off to Egypt the moment he set came home really soon. When that got old, he threw back some painkillers, rolled off the sofa, and began rifling through the messages on his desk.


	2. Chapter 2

Conan spent a lot of time eyeballing him. At first Richard let it go, because while it was annoying, it was more or less harmless. Certainly not any weirder than the rest of the shit the kid did. Compared to all that, a little staring was almost expected. Certainly enough random brats stared at him on the train.

The problem was, Conan didn't stare at him like the brats on the train. If Richard had to put his finger on it, it was more like he was a costly experiment Conan was expecting something specific from, and he wasn't delivering very promising results.

Richard tried organizing it all in his head on Tuesday, flipping between female wrestling and the aerobics channel. Somewhere between his fourth beer and his fifth cigarette, he figured out what was bothering him about the situation the most. Not just Conan, but _everything._

Case in point: in ten years in PI work, he'd been asked to assist on a grand total of two homicides. Two weeks had passed since Conan had limped through their door and Richard had already stumbled upon four. _Four._ In two weeks. He wasn't even trying. He'd be getting out of a taxi or walking home from the convenience store or taking Rachel to an event, and suddenly people around him were dead. Usually gruesomely.

He'd solve the case and evening would fall and Conan would be rooting through a pile of empty food cartons to find a pencil or a notepad, and Richard would suddenly realize, _wait, this place is a mess._ It was no different than it had been the day before, but now he _noticed_ it.

So he'd pick up something here and there, throw some trash away, and then he'd spend the rest of the night feeling resentful because _this was his house,_ he wasn't going to let some freeloader tell him how to run it. He'd been fine. Rachel had been fine.

Conan's arrival seemed to have triggered some ancient celestial sigil in the sky over Beika that read 'Everyone Start Dying Right Fucking Now'. Also, 'Moore, clean your office before you break your neck slipping on an empty chip bag'.

Only one of those things really mattered in the grand scheme of things, so it made sense that the other one kept him up at night.

* * *

.

Eva called the beginning of the third week. "Oh, honey, swell," Richard said. "Here, let me disconnect the phone and get right back to you."

" _Trust me, this won't take long."_ There was some sort of jazz music playing in the background a fax machine grinding in another room. It drove Richard up the wall to hear Eva drawl, which was precisely why she did it. _"Unless the famous detective is too swamped in cases to speak to his wife."_

"As a matter of fact, I am," Richard said, prying a piece of lint from his toenail with his toothpick. "We professional crime solvers have it rough. Always finding things you common folk misplace."

" _Thank goodness we can rely on the illusion of your competence. Is Rachel home?"_

"She's out with the brat buying groceries. With _my case money,_ I might add."

" _Richard, if this call was meant to extol your accomplishments, it would have ended before it went through,"_ Eva said. _"There are three things I need to know and I need you to answer them directly, so sit up, stop playing with your feet, and answer directly, if at all possible."_

"Okay, look," Richard said, straightening in his chair, but Eva bulldozed right over him. _"I noticed that you withdrew money from our emergency savings account last week. I was calling to confirm your excellent reason for that."_

"None of your business," he growled, irritated enough to make trouble for her.

" _I'm telling you right now, Richard, if you used that money for gambling or booze, I will cross heaven and hell to make life difficult for you."_

"It's just a few doctor's bills, all right? Get off my back. I'm putting more in at the end of the week to top it off."

There was an short pause. When she spoke again, her voice was crisp. _"Rachel?"_

"For me. Forget about it."

He could picture his wife on the other end, pausing over her stacks of papers, staring intently at the opposite wall as her pen stilled in her hand. Seven years ago she might have asked _are **you** all right, _but that was back when it'd been acceptable to be vulnerable with each other. Now they just threw knives until one of them bled out enough to drop the phone. _"All right,"_ she said at last, her ire audibly cooled. _"Please give me the courtesy of a notice next time. It was an unwelcome surprise to see it on the statement."_

"Fine. Next?"

" _I wanted to know about that little boy who's staying with you. Have you gotten any leads as to where he's from? Has he mentioned his parents at all?"_

"No. Says he's related to Agasa, but there's not much family resemblance if you ask me."

" _What is his full name again?"_ He heard papers rustling. A phone rang distantly, barely reaching his ears, but she was apparently ignoring calls at the moment.

"Conan Edogawa. Why? What are you doing?"

" _I was just curious."_

He knew her well enough to know what 'just curious' meant. Oddly enough, he was okay with it. He wasn't getting any leads investigating the kid – granted, he hadn't been looking all the hard, but still – and Eva had a way of getting everything she wanted, regardless of whether or not it was her business. The best thing to do was to leave it in her lap and see what she could do with it. "Is that all? I've got a show coming on."

" _One last order of business."_ Her voice got closer to the receiver, and he knew once again her attention was on him. _"I want to know how Rachel is."_

"Rachel?" Richard automatically looked up, as though he could see through the ceiling and into her room. "What about her?"

" _She's been at several crime scenes these past couple of weeks. She sounds cheerful enough when I try to talk to her, but I get the sense that she's hiding something. I wanted to know from you, off the record, how you think she's holding up."_

"What do you mean, 'holding up'? She's just fine."

" _Just fine,"_ Eva repeated. _"Richard, she saw bodies. Dead, bloody bodies."_

"Yeah, so? She's the daughter of a famous detective, you know. She eats crime scenes for breakfast. She loves it."

" _She's a seventeen year-old girl and it's not good for her to be exposed to all of that violence."_

"I'm telling you, it's not a big deal. And who knows, she'll probably be seeing more of that stuff, with all the cases I've been getting. Don't worry about her. The girl's tough."

He could hear her sigh over the line. The office phone started ringing again and the sound of shuffling papers resumed. "You know, there's still time to extol my virtues," Richard said. "I've got some time before the show comes on. I'm ready and waiting, if you know what I mean."

" _Hmm, you have a point,"_ Eva said. _"I'm inspired. Turn on the speaker function. I'd like to shout it to the room."_

Richard reached over the desk with his bare toe and toggled it. "Okay," he said, stretching back luxuriously. "Have at it."

The sound of the receiver crashing down on the other end was loud enough to rattle the picture frame on his desk.

Richard spent a full minute trying to hang up the receiver with his foot before giving up and shoving the entire unit to the floor.

* * *

.

The first time he'd solved a case in his sleep, he'd woken up to cheers and congratulatory slaps on the back enthusiastic enough to bruise. Weeks later, he still couldn't pull up the particulars – but then again, cranial trauma could do that to you. Whatever had hit him had taken away the details but none of the glory, so he figured he could live with the inconvenience.

The fourth time he blacked out solving a case (something about a model and… the context escaped him, but there had been an elevator and Rachel had cried a lot) he woke up to Meguire's fingers folded over the pulse in his wrist. There was cold tile under his ass and a fountain somewhere to his right that was creating a confusing static wall of noise.

Richard blinked slowly until objects emerged from the blur. There wasn't any cheering or conversation to cue him into current events, which had become par for the course up until this point. Chances were he screwed up somewhere, but whatever. That was easy to fix. Just close his eyes and let things get solved. "Starting to get a little worried, Moore," Meguire said nonjudgmentally.

"Inspector!" Remembering that he had an audience, Richard rolled his head back to center, waffling between pleasant curiosity and a semi-urgent need to throw up in everybody's lap. "Hey, did I catch the guy? You can be honest."

"The guy," Meguire echoed flatly. His eyes were on his watch as he continued to take Richard's pulse.

"You know. The guy." He began to gesture with his hand, then remembered Meguire had a hold of it. Rachel and Conan were lingering along the sidelines, somewhat out of focus and therefore not relevant. "The bad guy. Did I catch him?"

"The bad – you mean, the _woman_? The suspect?"

"Yeah, that one. Did I get her?"

There was no movement or response for a handful of seconds. Meguire's hand let go of his wrist, only to slide onto his forehead. "What," Richard said. "I'm not sick."

"You're something." Meguire's mutter was grim. He took up Richard's chin and tilted his head back to study his eyes. "Just trying to figure out if it's sleep-it-off-something or hospital-something."

He saw Rachel blanch. "Quit scaring my kid," Richard said. "Did I catch the suspect or not?"

"You really don't remember."

That was probably a trick question. Was it a question? The inflection on it had sounded off and Meguire was looking like he'd already come to his own conclusion on it anyway. More to the point, Richard really didn't know if what he didn't remember was relevant. Everything seemed to be pretty well wrapped up without him having to get all sentimental about it. "I don't _not_ remember."

Meguire let him go and eased slowly back onto his heels. Richard noticed belatedly that he was twisting his radio around in his free hand with rhythmic, absent-minded dexterity, thumb brushing near the call button with every rotation. "Rachel, you mind taking Conan outside for some air?" Meguire asked abruptly, not turning around.

"Huh?" Rachel started a bit. "Why?"

"Just gotta talk to your old man for a minute."

Richard watched Rachel's eyes slide over to him. The part of him that was cogent thanked god that Eva hadn't found a way to dash-cam their kid, because the expression on Rachel's face just then was about twenty years and three pain-in-the-ass kids too early. "I promise I'm not trying to be rude, Inspector, but I think Dad's really tired," Rachel said hesitantly. "Couldn't he maybe… call in the morning? Or take notes or something to send in?"

"Don't plan to keep him all night, kid," Meguire reassured her. "I'm just after some last-minute details. That and I'm thinking Conan's hung around this crime scene long enough for a little kid. Figure he doesn't really need to hear any more gory details. Do you?"

Rachel was smart as hell but too new on this earth to see through manipulation of that caliber. "No, you're right," she sighed. She dropped to a squat to get to Conan's level. "Come on, Conan, let's go. The adults have to talk."

" _What?_ " The full-force whine in Conan's voice shot straight through Richard's head and manifested as a pain in his ass. "We're _leaving?_ But you were so excited about being a model! Aren't they still gonna do it? You worked so hard!"

"Maybe some other time." Rachel's smile was brave but forced as she stood, offering down a hand for him to take. "Let's go outside, okay? I know of a great little ice-cream place just around the corner from here."

Conan took the proffered hand slowly but looked rightly suspicious. "But you always say no sweets before dinner. And anyway, what if there are bad guys still hanging out outside? I'm too scared to go by myself. We should stay with Uncle and Inspector Meguire."

"Good thinking," Meguire said. "Rachel, Officer Kay's stationed outside. Tell her I told her to escort you there and pick up the tab. Department's treat."

"Really?" Rachel's tired eyes flared in cautious surprise. "That's awfully kind of you, Inspector, but we couldn't possibly—"

"Kay." Meguire spoke into the comm. "Ice-cream run. Situation critical. Civilian lives at stake."

" _Roger._ " The door at the entrance wooshed open and Kay's dark head poked in. She scanned the area until she laid eyes on Rachel and Conan, then motioned with a quick jerk of her thumb. "Got the escape vehicle out front. We're going lights a-blazing."

"I guess we're being rescued, Conan," Rachel laughed. She kept a hold of his hand and tugged him out, but not before she spared Richard a last-minute glance. Kay gave Meguire a thumbs up as the two walked past; soon the door wooshed back shut behind them, cutting off a discussion about fudge or caramel and how it'd be _one or the other, Conan, I refuse to peel you off the ceiling from a sugar high._

Meguire and Richard were left alone in the cold silence of the lobby, the unyielding linoleum digging into Richard's tailbone, the studio lights overhead spearing into his eyes.

"What are you on," Meguire said.

"Nothing." He wished this part was over so that maybe he could get in on some fudge too. He could ask Rachel to go out and get some for him later, except she'd received some fairly major psychological trauma today and a good father would probably prioritize that over ice-cream. "I'm fine."

"You're on something. Based on your pulse and the size of your pupils, my money's on some kind of BZD. Now I can take you to the hospital and have them figure it out, or you can spill what it is you took and I can see about getting you some rehab out of the public eye."

Richard had been preparing to sit through Meguire's usual laundry list of boring speeches, like 'you gotta take care of yourself for your daughter's sake' or the 'you're a civilian now so stop running around like a drunk vigilante pain in my ass'. Regulation pupil size was a new one. "But I'm not."

"You and I go back too far for me to let you do this. Just fess up and I'll do what I can to keep it off the books."

"Is this about me solving the case before the department did? Because the great Richard Moore will be more than happy to trade some of the glory for a little financial compensation," the great Richard Moore said. "Or an invitation to the policemen's ball. Do the ladies in the department still wear the skirts, or have they have those—"

"Richard, so help me, if you hand me any more bullshit today I'm going to make you eat it," Meguire snapped. "I was your partner for seven years. The shtick you give to the reporters isn't gonna fly with me. You're so stoned you can't tell an eye in your head from a hole in your ass, now _tell me what you took_."

Richard stopped short, taken aback by the venom. Meguire waited him out with a flinty, uncompromising gaze, thumb lingering near the call button on his radio. "Oh, _I_ get it," Richard said, anger of his own surging past the pleasant fog. "So I can't possibly solve these on my own without a little help, huh? Is that what you're saying? Are you really so jealous you'll go so far as to accuse me of drug use so you can have an excuse to lock away the competition?"

Meguire's hand went over his eyes for a moment. "That's it, isn't it," Richard said triumphantly. "Fine. If that's the way you're going to play it, then I'll just—"

" _Sedatives don't help you solve crimes,_ " Meguire exploded. "Do you try to be this stupid? What do you take me for?"

"What am I supposed to be taking you for?" He felt like he'd stepped into an alternate dimension comprised solely of things that were either trying to kill him or hated him enough to want him dead at least a little. "What is going on right now?"

"This on top of binging is gonna kill you. You're _really_ going to put your family through that to win some kind of cock contest with the department?"

"I'm not trying to do anything except get ice-cream!"

"And if you think for even one goddamn second I'm helping you cover up your addiction just because we were partners—"

" _I'm not_ —"

"—then I'm going to disappoint you. If you're going to self-destruct, I'm not letting you take Eva's daughter with you."

Rage spiked in him with enough force to chase out the remaining fog. Richard lunged to his feet, dragging Meguire with him up by the lapels. He had maybe two seconds to consider the consequences of assaulting a cop before a sharp swell of dizziness derailed him, making him sway, nearly toppling them both over onto their asses.

Meguire caught him, shoving him back against the wall and pinning him there with about as much gentleness as Richard had been planning to put into his fist. There was a brief scuffle that ended in a tangle of mutual animosity: Richard still bunching Meguire's collar into his fist, Meguire's hand still pinning Richard against the wall.

Stymied, they stood a moment, breathing hard, both tensed to receive blows that never landed.

"You wanna try using your words this time, detective?" Meguire said after the silence had stretched a minute. His voice was dangerously soft.

The rage that'd sustained Richard abruptly evaporated. He let his hand slide from Meguire's collar and leaned his head against the wall, hoping he'd get a chance to throw up on Meguire at least once before he was arrested.

Meguire didn't arrest him. He seemed to be waiting for something else to happen. "I don't know what you want," Richard said, just to get it out there.

"Tell me what this is."

"I'm not on anything."

"I _know you're not, damn it,_ " Meguire growled suddenly, voice catching in frustration. "You think that makes this better? At least if it were drugs, that'd be _something_ I could work with. What do I do with this, Dick?"

How the hell was he supposed to know? He solved high-profile murder cases in his sleep now and the only thing he had to show for it was a headache and a daughter who wouldn't share her ice-cream with him. "Your wife called me up after you were on TV," Meguire said. "You know that? Asked me if I knew why you looked like a commuter train skipped the station and rammed itself into your ass instead."

That was actually really funny, but it wasn't a good time to remember all the reasons he'd married his terrible wife. "What did you tell her?"

"That I'd get to the bottom of it," Meguire said. "This is me getting to the bottom of it. If I let you walk out this door today, am I gonna be complicit in whatever the hell this is? Or is this the point where I stop you for your own good and have you thank me later?"

That sounded like the same question. Richard lifted his hand again and scrubbed the grit from his eyes to give himself time to think. "Or is this the point where I decide it's out of my hands, and this fuckery is your new normal, and I agree with the chief that it's time to take you on as a consultant so we can control how much you get underfoot," Meguire said.

Richard stopped scrubbing. He blinked at Meguire, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but Meguire didn't seem angry anymore. He seemed existentially tired, as though he'd already predicted the outcome of this conversation and was questioning the life choices that'd brought him here. "Huh?" Richard said.

"Told him it wouldn't do any good – that you're the same pain in the ass no matter whose payroll you're on," Meguire said. "But if this is your new shtick, and you're going to keep bringing these scumbags to justice with or without the department… I'd just as soon it'd be with us."

He was still confused and a little nauseated, but the word 'payroll' perked him up a little. He was familiar with consultants and the services they provided for the Beika police department. Between that case-by-case income and the uptick in revenue from his own agency, he might actually be able to send his daughter to college instead of a sweatshop after she graduated.

Still, he was a smart enough fisherman to know when bait was attached to a hook. "If you think I'm so dead-set on self-destructing, why are you telling me this?"

"Because my rec comes with a promise from you. The next time this happens – and god help me, the next time after that, and after _that_ – you call me matter what county you're in. What _country_ you're in. Before you go splashing around the crime scene, I'm in on it. Even if it's just over the phone."

What?Utterly baffled, Richard tried to drum up some rationale for it and came up empty. Was Meguire worried he'd steal the department's thunder? Beika PD had a decent solving rate on its own without his input. If anything, his cases probably wouldn't even register as a blip in their radar. He'd lost count of the number of mind-numbing afternoons he'd spent taking snapshots of cheating spouses or running background checks over and over again for companies hiring on new staff. He upsold the occupation to Rachel so she'd have something to brag about during Parent Day at school, but for the most part, good solid PI work – the kind of good, solid work that paid the bills and put food on the table – was boring. It was so boring it was nearly criminal.

He decided to test his theory anyway. "Why? So you can make sure I don't upstage the department?"

Meguire said, expression not changing, "So you have at least one person out there in the world who's covering your stupid ass."

… oh. Not sure what to do with that, confused in general by good intentions, Richard closed his mouth and let the silence sit in lieu of embarrassing himself further. "Sure, _now_ you shut up," Meguire muttered. He let Richard go, and Richard had a brief thought for what this was going to look like on the security tapes. "C'mon. Let's rescue the ice-cream shop from Kay before they issue a restraining order against the entire department."

"Do I get a ride home?" Richard asked, because sentimental moments were only as good as the amount of cab fare they saved him. Also his neck was itching and his queasiness told him he might be shelling out for an upholstery cleaning if he had to deal with a bouncy taxi ride.

Meguire didn't stop as the automatic door wooshed open. "No."

Richard called a taxi. By the time they got home, the evening news reporters were salivating over the case and Richard didn't owe anyone a cleaning bill, but neither seemed like particularly good payoffs for his efforts that day. He suffered through a well-intentioned meal and zen'd his way through a religion-shattering headache as he watched his favorite exercise program on mute.

Not wanting her in his face about it, Richard managed to wait all the way until Rachel went to bed that night to throw up in the bathroom. Incidentally, that part was easier to remember than the case.


	3. Chapter 3

The television stations started getting pushier, calling the office at all hours to try to set up interviews. Richard's level of attention at that time of night could generally be found somewhere near the bottom of his beer can and the channels he'd smuggled onto the apartment's TV and then parental-locked the hell out of. He consented to the first couple of calls that came in because why not, but when they persisted he started letting them fall into the answering machine. He was probably busy. And even if he wasn't, he was busy trying to avoid unwanted work, which counted as busy if you squinted at it right.

Once she'd caught on to the fact that he'd be paid for his time and his list of reasons for avoiding the interviews included 'too drunk to commit', Rachel's disapproval slippery-sloped into outright nagging. She began leaving sticky notes on the handle of his toothbrush and the snooze button on his alarm clock, bestowing him with a confetti assortment of times and names and dates until he could have sworn a telephone book exploded in his office. She only gave up when Richard started balling up the notes and storing them as ammunition to bounce off the back of her head whenever she walked by. "It's just not like you, Dad," she sighed, resignedly peeling the rest off the countertops. "They all said they'd pay _really_ good money to get you into their studios. You could always just choose one and have them pay extra for the exclusive rights, and that would make up for the rest. I just don't understand why you're ignoring them all. I thought you loved this kind of thing."

Maybe. Richard tried not to think about it and ended up marinating in it anyway. He laser-guided the realignment of his Zen with a bag of pretzels and a marathon run of Torrential Hearts season 2, bending his attention towards the very important question of whether Haruka was a better fit with Matsuo or with that chick from the deli.

By the end of episode six he'd determined that a) two racks were always better than one, so yes to the deli chick, but also b.) excuses only worked when he could convince himself they were legitimate. The fact was, once the mainstream hype died down, Richard still had to scrape up enough dough every week to feed Rachel's cavernous yawp. With another kid added to the load, the need for boring, low-profile work had doubled. Fame was nice, but having to wave off random passersby seeking signatures when he was trying to chase cheating spouses had already cost him two of that week's tails. Less money meant less beer, so as long as dying remained trendy in Beika, Richard was not only losing more than he was gaining, he was doing it sober.

In the meantime, he'd scared himself stupid getting out of bed that past week by accidentally stepping on Conan twice. The second time had produced a terrifying snapping sound that'd ended up just being the kid's joint popping, but after the kids had left for school, it'd taken three cigarettes before Richard's hands had quit shaking. _Why, from where,_ and _who the hell_ were really the main questions, but most of all, _what am I supposed to do with this kid._

Case in point: Conan had come down with a cold the previous week. It'd passed quickly and Rachel had taken care of it, but the entire situation had left Richard too tense to shit. Just what was he supposed to do if the kid got really sick? Even if they brought him to a hospital, there was no medical history. No data on drug allergies, risk factors, blood type. Suppose the kid got a cavity? Needed a transfusion? Was he allergic to anything? Bee stings, peanuts?

Richard tended to handwave a lot in his life because too much thinking made him drink, but the sheer amount of missing information was maddening. There was no place to start. Really no place to end, either, because while he knew for a fact Conan's name was an alias, he knew better than to think he'd get a real answer if he put the screws to him.

So he pissed himself off the next time he did the bills, starting a rainy day fund for Conan's future expenses, and that really was the ultimate fucking surrender, wasn't it. This couldn't even be counted as fostering, because fostering included medical dossiers and government assistance and scheduled visits from social workers. At best this was absorbing. Conan was being absorbed, and his real parents couldn't be bothered to find out who and what was absorbing him.

He was too tired to drink. He lay on his bed that night, listening to Conan's soft breathing, turning it over and over. Call social services, have them pick the kid up and do whatever they wanted with him. It'd break Rachel's heart but she'd deal. Conan could be returned to his home, and if there was abuse there – if that's what had driven him out in the first place – too bad. Maybe social services would catch it. Maybe not. It was unfortunate but it wasn't Richard's problem. It wasn't his _fault._

On the other side: not calling. The kid could camp here until he got bored enough to run back home. Rachel had stopped begging for a dog after Conan had showed up, so there was a plus. There'd be no nagging sensation in the back of his head that Richard had thrown him back to a place that didn't want him. And then, when the inevitable happened – the kid got hurt, the kid got sick, the kid broke something doing something stupid – Richard would be tossed in jail and Rachel would live with her mother and Eva would get her the dog and send him pictures of it in prison just to screw with him.

 _Do it_. The phone was downstairs. He could end it right now. Conan would be gone by morning and the entire affair would blow over within the week.

On the floor, Conan shifted in his sleep. His hand slid from the blankets to relocate just under his chin, little fingers curling against his jaw. He said, with no particular inflection, "Rachel."

 _Do it._

He…

… he needed a vacation.

* * *

.

"This wasn't even remotely what I meant, you idiot," Meguire exploded. "How the hell does anyone set out on a two-day cruise and come back with this many dead bodies? What _are_ you?"

"Inspector!" Richard beamed at him goofily. "When did you get here? Hey, have a seat. There's lots of room in this ambulance."

"I'm off-duty, it's dinnertime, I'm tired enough to see double, I get this cryptic goddamn call from the EMT to pick you up in a port city an hour away, and it's _all because you're too cheap to spring for cab fare._ "

"Just think, three for the price of one! Two dead bodies delivered, _plus_ the culprit, plus the case, all wrapped up and ready to go. I tell you, that Hannigan family's a piece of work. You might as well lock them all up just to be safe. Except Susanna. She's got nice legs."

"Shut up." Meguire's finger was in his face while his other hand dug in his pocket. A flash of his badge had the concerned EMT on Richard's left backing off as quickly as he'd walked up. "You're going to shut up right now."

"But then you won't hear my tale of—"

" _Shut up._ " Meguire yanked out his phone with the same hand. " _This_ ," he snapped, shoving it in Richard's face. "This is what you were supposed to use. _Before_ you ran roughshod over the crime scene. Not after. Not to ask me to pick up your dry cleaning. Not to scrape you off a barstool. _You call me when there's a body and then you wait until I'm there to do something about it._ "

"But I was on a boat. You hate boats."

"You know what I hate more? You," Meguire said. "On a boat. You mind telling me why you felt the need to commemorate your cruise with two dead bodies? And not just any two dead bodies – two dead bodies _from one of the most influential families in the country_?"

"If it helps, they just got dead on the boat while I was on it," Richard said. "I don't actually collect them or anything."

"Richard, the crime scene's a mess. Missing murder weapon, a family who won't talk to anyone without a pedigree, a contaminated crime scene, and best of all? Your almighty evidence is a stale piece of bread. Do you do this to me on purpose? You're shivering." Meguire turned to the paramedic. "Why is he shivering?"

"We don't know," the paramedic said. "I thought he might be showing signs of shock earlier, but all his vitals are normal."

"Damn it." Meguire's grip slid around his wrist, steadying Richard's hand. "Easy. Just breathe a second."

"I'm fine." He wasn't cold but he couldn't get his body to sit still. The sun had set nearly an hour earlier, bending the breeze across the water and carrying in the chill. Police cars and ambulances were jammed up close to the docks, their lights bouncing off every surface until the entire harbor seemed to be pulsating. Meguire in contrast seemed to be unaffected by the chill, dressed down in slacks and a pullover, a stocking cap jammed over his head. Despite his attire he was the picture of authority – straight-backed and no-nonsense, with a thunderous expression that had already sent two paramedics scurrying. "It's over now."

Meguire's expression was peculiar. He looked tense and strangely frustrated, as though he were about to go off again, but when he spoke it was only to address the paramedic. "You taking him in?"

"We treated the Hannigan family for shock and we were going to transport him too as a precaution, but he's already RMA'd," the paramedic said.

"No you didn't," Meguire told Richard dangerously.

"I did, though!" Richard said. "That leaves us more time to grab dinner. You brought your wallet, right? As long as we're out this far, I know a great Italian place down the street that serves—"

"Shut up," Meguire said. "I'll make sure he gets home," he told the paramedic. "This is normal for him, god help me. Where's the form? I'll witness."

"Given that his signs are normal, I see no medical reason to retain him," the medic said, handing the RMA paperwork over. Meguire made short work of both the witness and the police signature before handing it back. "He's all set."

"Go find your kids," Meguire told Richard. "My car's outside this mess in Lot D, south of the docks. If you're not there in ten minutes, you can hop a ride on a dolphin and swim home."

Richard was feeling pretty philosophical as he peeled himself out of the thermal blanket. Barring the disorientation from the flashing lights, he actually felt rather good at the moment. A little cold, a little sleepy, but ultimately steadier than he'd been an hour ago. Nausea would be coming pretty soon, but hopefully after dinner and especially after spumoni. After nearly a decade of heavy drinking Richard was an expert on throwing up, and ice-cream was one of the few things in the world that tasted almost as decent on the way back up.

"Detective Moore?"

"Yeah," he yawned. His neck was itching.

The medic was grinning sheepishly, a pen and what looked to be the back of an old receipt in his hand. "This is unprofessional as hell, but I have to ask or my daughter will kill me," the medic said. "Would you mind signing this for her? She's a big fan of your work. She'd never forgive me if I let you go without getting your autograph."

"Your daughter, huh?" Richard brightened immediately, taking it with gusto. "Of course! The famous Richard Moore never overlooks a damsel in need. And what lovely lady should I make it out to?"

"Annie. She'll be so thrilled knowing you even touched the thing, let alone signed it."

"Single?"

The medic's smile didn't waver. "Eleven."

With slightly less enthusiasm, Richard nevertheless finished his signature with a flourish. The harbor was still a swarming mass of cops and reporters by the time he forged his way back onto the docks, leading to the necessity of elbowing a few heads before people figured out how not to be in his way. The intimidating presence of the Hannigan's ship loomed over them, throwing the flickering lights inside its shadow into sharp relief, and Richard found himself wondering what was going to happen to it. No doubt some powerful bribes in some interested ears would pave the way for most of the family, but good lawyers cost and the media would be out for blood. Once the crime scene was fully examined, the ship could very well be up for collateral. Richard had never had family members die on things he owned, so he wasn't quite sure how that sort of thing was supposed to play out emotionally. It was still a nice boat when it wasn't a floating morgue, so maybe the family could capitalize on that fact once the bloodstains were out of the carpet.

An empty stomach and general disassociation made tracking difficult, but Richard did his rounds, trying to suss out signs of his daughter amidst the chaos. By the time he found Rachel seated on one of the western-facing benches overlooking the water, the sun had set to a lazy eye, casting a dying glow over the surface of the waves.

Richard sidled up beside her, scratching his neck and squinting into the glare. Rachel was huddled in the blue windbreaker she'd thrown into her suitcase at the last minute before leaving home. Her arms were folded in close to her body, hair tangling in the roll of the wind. Their collective luggage from the ship sat in a neat pile on the bench next to her, hopefully sans bloodstains. "Inspector's here," Richard said. "I've given my statement. What do you say we blow this joint and pick up some chow before the restaurants close?"

Rachel didn't move. She looked off-color and exhausted under the dock's lamps.

"Hey." He tugged her ear. "C'mon. Let's beat it."

She reached up and pinched his hand away with expert and horrible force, but it was all distracted, her gaze still lingering out over the water. "Susanna and Theodore." Her voice was quiet enough that it was difficult to pick it out from the sounds of the waves. "Do you think they'll ever be happy again?"

"Who?" he yawned.

Rachel tilted her head just enough to give him a terrifying look. "Oh, right, them," Richard said, kicking himself. "I don't know. Why? Someone say something to you?"

She shook her head. "Look, hon, it's cold and this sucks," Richard said. "Can't this wait? Who cares?"

"Theodore joined their family just so he could sabotage them." Rachel didn't seem to hear him. The wind blew strands of hair into her mouth; she hooked her index finger and pulled them out, but her gaze remained distant. "Even if he grew to love her, would it even be the same for her? Knowing he was only interested at first because he wanted to hurt her family?"

The rocking of the boats behind them was doing strange things to him. Existentially bored and physically exhausted, Richard found himself swaying a little in tandem and forced himself to stop. "Look, either way you slice it, it's none of our business. I wouldn't lose any sleep over it."

"She was so happy, Dad." Rachel's voice dropped even further. She looked as exhausted and cold as he was, but a strange insistence pushed her on, kept her talking. "Her whole face just lit up when she saw him, you know? You should have seen her. Even if she forgives him, is everything ruined? Will anything be the same?"

Richard debated for a while, closing one eye and then the other. There were actually no words invented yet in modern language to describe how much he didn't care. The entire family was batshit and he'd had enough of them over the past twenty-four hours to last him a lifetime. Rachel was clearly hung up over it, though, so he figured he might as well give it a shot to help speed things along. "Listen, whether or not it's the same, it's up to them to patch it up. Susanna's got a good heart. Just because things are different doesn't mean they can never be happy again. I'm not saying Theodore didn't mess up, but they both took a vow to stay together, thick and thin, and I'm sure that's what they'll do."

Rachel finally looked at him. The smile on her face held a pale echo of its usual shine, but at least it was genuine. He hoped that meant he'd parented right at least once during the conversation. "Like you and Mom?"

 _Yeah. Great comparison._ "Like me and Mom. C'mon, let's get out of here."

"Okay." She gathered her legs underneath her and stood. On the way up she wobbled, and he quickly moved to steady her. "Sorry," she whispered, propping her forehead against his shoulder.

Without thinking he dropped a kiss on the top of her head. "Today was really bad," she said, muffled in his jacket. "Today was _really bad_ , Dad."

"Yeah. It happens."

"Can we go home?"

He counted to ten and made a heroic sacrifice of his hypothetical dinner. "Sure."

After a minute she pulled away. She pried her own luggage off the bench and propped the wheels on the ground, wiping her eyes with her spare hand and peering around the dock. "I'll find him," Richard said, guessing her intentions. "Go get your stuff packed in Meguire's car. He's parked out past the police cars in lot D."

She pulled the retractable handle out of the case and had the wherewithal to give him a suspicious look. "What, like I'm gonna try to lose him here?" Richard said. "A drunk cat could find its way home from this distance. If I'd _really_ wanted to shake him, I would've just tossed him over the side of the ship."

"Don't joke about that, Dad," she snapped, but he was apparently convincing enough to reassure her. Leaving behind Richard and Conan's luggage, she angled her own south and stormed off, wheels thumping rhythmically over the planks of the dock.

Richard spent a blissful minute fantasizing about losing the kid here or throwing him over the side of the ship. The second one was probably murder, but there was very little to stop him from going through with the first one. He wouldn't have to worry about Conan spending the night out on the streets, because someone far smarter than him would call the police right away when they spotted an adult-less elementary school kid wandering around after dark. The sheer relief of finally unloading Conan would almost make up for Richard's disappointment over losing out on ice-cream that evening.

Except there was no way to hide from Rachel that he actually hadn't, in fact, loaded Conan into the car, and despite all of the unflattering things that defined Richard as a person in general, he could admit he wasn't in a hurry to see Rachel's tears again for a while.

Fed up with philanthropy and grumpy as hell, Richard remorselessly trespassed up the ratlines of someone else's ship to get a bird's eye view. He located Conan on the exact opposite end of the planet, parked on the other side of the Hannigan's ship, well away from the crush of officers and paramedics. His back was to the chaos, his hands jammed deep in his pockets.

Richard caught his foot in the last rung coming down and plunged to the deck, which he actually did sort of have coming. He soothed his damaged pride by lighting up as he worked his way through the crowd, dragging his luggage along behind him with his spare hand until he finally spotted Conan through the sea of legs.

He took a final drag on the cigarette, blew the plume of smoke through his nose, and flicked the butt into the water. "Get a move on, brat," he announced. "We're rolling out."

"Okay," Conan said absently. He didn't turn, bespectacled gaze on the Hannigan's ship. The last shimmer of the sun had almost vanished, plunging the docks into moody hues, but there was just enough light to glint off Conan's glasses, making the expression underneath impossible to read.

Without any reason, not quite knowing why, Richard paused to take him in. Conan was barely up to Richard's knee, but the posture he'd adopted as he studied the ship – angled back, shoulders thrown, hands in his pockets – suddenly looked strikingly familiar. Richard tried to remember if he'd ever seen that kind of poise in Rachel at that age, but everything he remembered from Rachel at seven was her inability to sit still for more than four seconds unless he parked her in front of the TV.

It was almost, Richard thought, and then thought, _it's almost as if—_

Someone jostled him from behind, apologizing as they passed, and just like that the thought was lost. Richard's skinned elbows stung from their impact with the deck, but he bravely soldiered through the pain in order to drill his fist directly atop Conan's fat head. Conan's shriek of pain bounced off the side of the ship and landed somewhere near Paris. "Listen the first time I tell you things," Richard said. "Hurry up. We don't have all night."

"We have to find Rachel," Conan said, massaging the spot and glaring up at him.

"I already found her." On second thought he dropped Conan's duffel atop his head, eliciting another yelp. "In case you've forgotten, _one_ of us here is an ace detective. Now either hurry up and get in the car or wait for the next murder ship to haul your freeloading carcass home."

* * *

.

He slept the entire way back, not stirring until Meguire shook his shoulder. Rachel and Conan were piling out of the backseat on stiff limbs, yawning their complaints into the frigid air and traipsing around back to fetch their luggage from the trunk.

Richard vaguely remembered this feeling from when he'd misread the label on a bottle of 80-proof on his twenty-second birthday and had woken up naked on a golf course. The dashboard lights were swimming and it felt tricky to breathe, like someone had swapped out the oxygen in the air with honey.

Only about half in his head, it took him a long handful of seconds to realize it was Meguire holding him back rather than the seatbelt he'd already unlatched. "You need me to come up?" Meguire asked, quiet and serious, low enough so the kids didn't overhear.

It was indicative of how shitty he felt that he very nearly said yes. He had a feeling he'd make it up the stairs if he were trebuchet'd, but tackling it on foot was going to have middling results. Normally he'd faceplant on the couch in the office when he felt this wasted, but something told him he should probably be emotionally available for Rachel for at least twenty-four hours after exposing her to dead bodies. "I'm all right."

"You sure?' Meguire's gaze was sans bullshit. "Not too late to head to the hospital."

Richard blinked slowly at the dimmed lights of the coffee shop underneath his agency. He wished his neck would stop itching long enough to let him think. "Why don't I come up," Meguire said. "Scrape something up for your kids to eat for dinner. Give you a minute to yourself."

Richard didn't dare move for a long moment, terrified to feel his throat constrict in tandem with his chest. Bitching he could handle. Meguire's unselfish concern for him was far more damaging to his composure. "Thanks," he muttered, and had to swallow. "I'm all right. Just need to sleep."

"All right." But Meguire shook his head, reaching over to ease the heat dial down. Richard hadn't realized until that point that Meguire had cranked it up for him. "I got the day off tomorrow and I'll be in town with Midori. Give me a call if you need us to drop by."

The trek up the stairs to the apartment was just as hellish as Richard had predicted. He circumvented the need for a trebuchet by pretending to need something from his office, sending the kids up the next flight ahead of him. He let himself in and found a wall and promptly fell asleep against it until Rachel came back down to drag both his luggage and his ass up with her.

He'd had concrete plans to put her down and make himself some coffee while he waited for Eva's angry phone call, but Rachel was strangely prescient, steering him away from the kitchen and putting him to bed instead. He didn't have the energy to argue with her. He mashed his face against the corner of his mattress and forced his body to stay topside until he heard her settle Conan in the blankets down on his floor, then let the bottom drop out from under the world.

He slept forever or maybe an hour. When he woke it was to city-lit darkness, gasping from a vibrant dream he couldn't remember. The room swirled around him with bright pinpricks of random lights – his alarm clock, the light from his pager, the LED on the carbon monoxide detector.

He worked himself up against his pillows and felt his stomach lurch with the motion. He leaned over and massaged his face with both hands, breathing unsteadily, feeling the sweat cool unpleasantly on his skin. "Richard?" Conan had sat up on his bedroll on the floor next to him, face obscured in the gloom. "Are you okay?"

"Mind your business, you damn nosy brat," he said, but it came out " _mmmrph_ " and he was stumbling out of bed to throw up in the bathroom.

Oddly enough, he felt himself relaxing as he ralphed. His neck still prickled and burned, his heartbeat rapid and fluttering in weird places on his body – fingertips, throat, stomach – but throwing up typically meant the beginning of the end of whatever it was that assaulted him after his cases. At least now he'd be able to sleep without feeling like something was chasing him.

When the retching tapered off, Richard spat a final time before reaching up and flushing the toilet. He still felt a little woozy, but the nausea was gone. He closed the lid and used it to climb to his feet, transferring his grip to the sink to make sure he stayed upright. Only then did he notice Conan standing in the doorway. "Are you all right?" Conan asked, tense but low. Apparently he'd picked up on the goal not to rouse Rachel.

Richard grunted. He retrieved his rinsing cup from the cupboard above the sink and filled it with water. He knocked some back, swishing it between his teeth, and spat. "Are you sick?" Conan's voice came from his periphery again.

"Nah." Richard debated brushing his teeth. You were supposed to, right? The acid. Whatever. He grabbed his toothbrush. "Happens after every case."

There was no response for a moment. Richard squirted some toothpaste on the brush and side-eyed him. Conan had gone very still, the bathroom lights throwing a sheen over his glasses. "You've been throwing up after every case?" Conan asked.

Richard jammed the toothbrush in his mouth. He was almost too tired to move it around. If it just sat there, kind of foamed up with spit, that still did something, right? " _Every_ case?" Conan pressed. "This whole month?"

He made a vague noise in his throat. "Is it…" Conan stopped, seemed to gather himself. "Is it just after the ones where you do your… your meditation, or is it all of them?"

Richard ran his brush over his teeth perfunctorily, spit, and rinsed the brush. After another gulp of water, he replaced his supplies and shuffled toward the door, yawning. He was vaguely aware of Conan following him and didn't care. Let the kid haunt him. There were certainly enough other things in Richard's life that did. One more drop in the sea didn't bring it up any higher on the shore.

Richard crashed onto his bed with enough force to make the frame squeak, and on second thought pried himself upwards just enough to peel off his shirt and toss it to the side. It landed on the lamp. He fell face-down into his blankets and breathed in deeply, relishing being horizontal. "Richard?" Conan whispered, somewhere off to the side of the bed.

Already mostly asleep, Richard dragged one of the pillows off his pile and flung it at him without looking. Conan's muffled yelp was satisfying. "Go to sleep, brat," Richard mumbled. He turned his cheek over to a dry spot on his remaining pillow and for the second time that night traded one darkness for another.

* * *

.

He'd half-expected Rachel to stay home the next day, but by the time he woke up both kids were gone. Considering school started back up soon and their vacation thus far had mostly consisted of sightseeing corpses, Richard figured he'd cut them some slack and handwave whatever trouble they were getting into without him.

He shamelessly enjoyed a leisurely morning of coffee and newspaper and salivating over an aerobics program hosted by three women of varying bustiness, then turned his attention towards the possibility of visiting the racetrack. The responsible thing to do would be to sleep off the vestiges of his headache and maybe meet new clients, but on the other hand he'd solved crime yesterday and variety was the spice of life. No one could blame him for diversifying.

He changed his clothes and spent a hardworking quarter of an hour scraping up whatever spare cash he could find in the apartment. Rachel was pretty good about hiding the grocery money, but Richard was a famous detective and also the reigning champion of doing things the women in his life hated. He found most of the bills paperclipped inside the kitchen vent and the other half of the stash pinned to the underside of the couch. He didn't go quite so far as to steal from their mutual rainy day fund, but he did appropriate a few chocolates from her secret stash behind the microwave as a reward for his restraint. He made short work of them as he took public transportation to the tracks, sucking the last of the evidence off his thumb as he approached the gates.

The tracks ended up being packed, smelling gloriously of all the things Rachel hated to wash out of his clothes. The winter air was unseasonably mild compared to the weeks before, creating the sensation of spring that had the crowd roiling with excitement.

He bet outrageously at the window and spent the next several hours making a jackass of himself, jumping up and down and hollering at the top of his lungs under the thunder of passing hooves. It felt good. It was sunlight and relative warmth and people and risk that didn't involve anything important. He ended up finding two other brothers in arms that had bet on the same horse; they proceeded to spent the remainder of the time shelling out for beer and screaming obscenities at the track, pounding each other's backs, sloshing their drinks, making glorious chaos that nearly got them thrown out. They didn't care. _He_ didn't care.

The horse ended up losing, costing all the rest of last week's paycheck and some of the next, but he was too flushed to care about that either. Once he let it slip that he was the famous Richard Moore, the two men fell over themselves inviting him out to drink afterwards. They holed up in a nearby dive, and Richard proceeded to regale them with mostly-true tales of his crime-solving exploits until the afternoon faded into evening, and real life began encroaching on the edges of his hedonism.

He was saved from having to excuse himself when the two men ended up begging off first, citing wives and obligations. Richard cheerfully waved them off before pushing his hands in his pockets and sauntering down the street in the opposite direction. By the time he'd reached the bus stop, he'd forgotten both of their names.

He didn't get home until the sun was starting to decline, at which point some guilt was beginning to surface past the mild inebriation. He covered it by whistling as he worked the key in the lock, glancing up casually towards the office. The lights were on and the shades were up, which meant Rachel had returned earlier and would have likely been crankier than a coked-up hornet to find the office unmanned during one of their busiest days.

Whatever. He'd just have to deal with the lecture and hope she ran out of steam before his evening programs came on. In the meantime the lock was sticking in the gummy pre-dusk humidity and his buzz was taking a hit, so he gave it a little more of his attention, trying again. The key jammed.

Swearing under his breath, Richard yanked it out again and bent over, squinting into the keyhole to check for obstructions. The hole seemed clear, but it was also getting dark and he didn't carry a penlight, so who the hell really knew.

 _Give me a break._ Rapidly souring, Richard readied another attempt and was halfway considering climbing up the nearest light post and making a jump for the window when a sudden, piercing scream came from upstairs.

Badly startled, he fumbled the key and gouged the face of the lock. A second scream came almost immediately on the heels of the first, this one longer and more blood-curdling.

 _Rachel._ His buzz dissipated under a deluge of fear. Cursing, Richard slammed the key in and jiggled it hard, gritting his teeth, and finally managed to slide the bolt aside. He ripped it out and took the stairs by two, skidding to a halt when he realized the door to the agency was cracked open, allowing light to spill onto the landing.

Rachel screamed again from within. Richard yanked the door open and propelled himself inside. Based on the timbre of her squalling, he'd expected to see a naval battle in an ocean of goddamn blood. He was met instead with the sight of an undisturbed office warmly lit by lamps, bookshelves neater than he'd left them, coasters spaced out evenly on the coffee table. Rachel was on the couch nearest the door, curled into a ball on her side, still in her street clothes.

Then she stirred to scream again, and Richard realized with a jolt, _my seventeen year-old is having a nightmare._ More specifically, his seventeen year-old was having a nightmare on his office couch that could be heard over in Beijing. He couldn't remember the last time she'd admitted to even having them anymore, let alone the last time she'd actually raised the dead with one.

Then she screamed again, and instincts exactly as old as his daughter jarred Richard from his stupor. He tripped over her bookbag as he ran forward, stumbling and skidding on his knees to shake her shoulder. She cringed away from his touch, weeping into the cushions.

His blood felt like mountain runoff down his spine. "Being a noise disturbance, kid," he muttered. Adrenaline made his hands shake as he gripped both of her shoulders, giving her a solid jostle. "Wake up. C'mon."

Rachel flinched away again with an inarticulate protest. "Shake it off, sweetheart." Richard worked a hand behind her head so she didn't wrench her stupid neck, then gave her shoulder another jostle. "Shake it off. C'mon."

He heard her inhale noisily, letting out a tear-choked gasp. A moment later her eyes flew open to focus on him wildly.

Richard had a half a second to think _okay, now what the hell was so,_ when the world became a series of impacts. Stomach, ribs, solar plexus, and a blow to the side of the head that hurled him into the coffee table and sent it careening onto its side.

He'd barely hit the floor before Rachel was on him, frantically organizing him, trying to turn him over to see his face. " _Dad!_ "

"Ma wah," he said coherently, ass vaguely where his head should be.

"Oh no oh no oh no." Rachel was a frenzy of movement, leaping up and changing her mind, thumping back down to her knees beside him and gathering him up against her. "Dad? Can you hear me? Oh god, don't move, I'm going to call an ambulance. Wait right here."

He swore as his head hit the floor again. He flailed out with a hand and grabbed her wrist as she tried to stand, and Rachel instantly dropped back to her knees to help him sit. "I'm so sorry," she said tearfully, pushing his hair aside, trying to find where she'd hit him. "I was taking a nap and I got startled, I didn't mean to hurt you, I was just—"

"What the hell were you dreaming about?" he got out, irritably batting her hand aside. "The Battle of Waterloo?"

"No, it wasn't – _stop_ it, Dad, just let me look." She parted his hair and sucked in a breath. "I'm getting ice."

"I don't need—" This time Richard managed to catch himself in time to avoid a collision with the floor. A minute later Rachel was dashing back down the stairs with a comically overstuffed baggie of ice. "What's the big idea, anyway?" he asked her as she eased it up against the side of his head. "I thought you were supposed to be watching the office. I don't pay you to take naps, you know."

"You don't pay me at all," she said crossly. Her nostrils flared with irritation when he continued to try to pry her hand away. "Then _you_ hold it, Dad. I'm serious. It needs to be on there for at least a few minutes."

He grumpily lifted his hand and held the ice pack in place for himself. Left without a task, Rachel got to work setting the coffee table back up, neurotically replacing the ashtray and the coasters back in the exact same spots. Her hands were shaking nearly as much as his own. "I _was_ watching the office, but I was really tired, okay?" she said abruptly. "I just fell asleep. It's not like it's a crime."

"I don't know, I think a certain lawyer in the family could probably win at least a few allowances from you in court."

"This isn't funny, Dad."

It kind of was. He wasn't thrilled about being knocked onto his ass, but there was a certain satisfaction in knowing he raised a daughter who could clout a full-grown man's teeth out the other end of him from a dead sleep. "What were you even dreaming about?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Was it witches?"

She sighed. "No, it wasn't witches."

Well there went the full list of his ideas. He had no idea what else could scare a girl her age so thoroughly besides maybe 'chores' or 'cleaning your stupid hair out from the drain in the bathtub'. Knowing the gobs she routinely left behind, he'd wager that she'd been dreaming about the hair-goblins that had grown into malevolent colonies down in the pipes.

Well, whatever. Now that he was assured she was safe and there didn't seem to be lasting damage to anything, Richard was fine playing along for now. "We get any clients while I was away?"

"Huh? Oh. Um…" Rachel paused, smoothing both hands over her sleep-tousled hair. When she spoke again she was more composed. "There were some messages on the voice mail – I took those down on the notepad on your desk. I answered two more once I got here and got their numbers, so you should probably call them back soon. Oh, and there was one walk-in, but she said she'd only talk to you one on one. She didn't leave any information with me."

"Huh." Sounded like a night off to him. Written messages had a rich history of getting lost in the delivery. He knew his body well enough to know that he'd escaped any serious injury, so really, the day was still pretty much a win. Provided he could manage to not be sober when he hit his pillow, he could easily finish this day strong.

"Speaking of that, we're _really_ low on groceries." Rachel had gone to retrieve the notepad. She now paused and looked up from it, giving him her full attention. "Do you still have that case money from last week? There are cobwebs growing in the refrigerator. I can go out tonight if you give it to me."

"Uh," he said.

Rachel straightened a bit. She searched his expression for a moment before her own changed from hassled to suspicious. "What do you mean, _uh,_ " she said.

"About that."

"About _what,_ Dad?"

"I maybe," Richard said, and pondered his words. All his excuses sounded vaguely punishable by law. "It might have been… relocated."

"Relocated," she said.

"To other venues."

Rachel watched him. "To equine venues," Richard said, hoping he'd raised a sufficiently undereducated child.

He hadn't. "You _gambled it away at the tracks?_ " Rachel hissed.

"I wouldn't go that far—"

"Then how far _would you go?_ "

"Okay, I gambled it," Richard said, and winced when she made a strangled noise of fury. "Look, I can get it back. I just need to be brilliant again sometime in the next… couple days. Really. I do it all the time."

"Dad, this is _totally_ unacceptable!"

"Just use the rainy day fund."

Rachel's eyes looked a little wild. "Do you see any rain?"

Richard wondered if there was some statute on daughter-on-father assault that should be excusing him from this lecture. He was pretty sure he should still have the high ground considering she'd just about knocked his brains out of his ear, but on the other hand he hadn't read any of the parenting manuals Eva had bought when she'd been pregnant. 'Losing momentum' was probably detailed in chapter two. "Look, I've got a few bucks. Let's just order out."

"All that take-out isn't good for Conan."

"You know what is good for him? Food," Richard said. "Versus not-food. Quit getting on my case. I'll make up the money. Just give me a little time."

"I can't do this." Rachel's hands were over her face. "I can't do this with you anymore, Dad."

The bag of ice was beginning to liquefy in his hand. Watching his daughter meltdown in a similar fashion, Richard suddenly didn't have a lot to say. He watched her scrub her eyes, run her hands down over her mouth and hold them there, blinking sightlessly at the ceiling for a while. "I'm going to go try to put together something," she muttered. "I'll get you when it's ready."

Richard watched her go. When he heard the door open and close to their apartment above them, he tossed the bag of ice on the coffee table and hauled himself up to get a beer. He retrieved the notepad of messages but didn't check it, holding it in one hand and opening the tab on the beer with the other.

The door downstairs opened, introducing thumps on the staircase. Out of breath, Conan appeared in the doorway, looking distracted and put-upon. He shrugged off his backpack as he came in the door, then stopped short when he saw Richard. "Who beat you up?" he asked blankly.

"I ran into a door," Richard said, and on second thought fished out two of the remaining ice-cubes from the bag to jam them into the can.


	4. Chapter 4

Rachel's mood hadn't recovered by the time dinner was ready, which meant a handful of good things and a fistful of bad things. In general, Rachel wanting to cook was good because Richard held a doctorate in laziness. Between he and Eva he'd been the better cook by far, but that'd had less to do with good culinary instincts and more to do with basic math. Little girls were picky eaters and Richard hated doing things twice, so getting good at cooking had been a necessary skill. The fact that Eva hadn't been able to match that skill despite giving exponentially more fucks about it had been the cause of half of their brawls. _You never have to try at anything,_ she'd finally snapped: a rare confession after hours of scrubbing down scorched skillets with baking soda. _So much natural talent, and all you do with it is skirt-chase and binge._

Richard wasn't altogether sure what drove people to be competitive when it didn't net them something specific. He'd taken Judo at first to discourage his father from whaling on him and later because it was a good way to get out his own aggression, but the tournaments had always felt pointless. Tangible things – cash, gift cards, a kiss from a busty woman, a trip that got him out of town for a while – were worth expending effort for. Accolades were nice but didn't line his pocket or fill his stomach, so he'd never bothered to try when the reward was hypothetical. Time was valuable and the heat death of the universe was imminent, so not only was saving energy practical, it made him a hero of all living things.

Then Eva had walked out of their lives, and the need to cook no longer seemed hypothetically rewarding. Single parenthood and a slimmer budget and forced Richard to become a black belt in cheap rice dishes he could rearrange into Rachel's lunch without her noticing. Add that to a hike in living expenses and leaving Beika PD, and Richard had suddenly found that proficient cooking netted him very, very specific benefits.

There were plenty of things to take away from his failed marriage and maybe even some things he'd be willing to take the blame for, but Richard knew, deep down in the part of his heart that saw the least amount of light, that he'd never really forgive Eva for walking out on him when he'd been at his most vulnerable. They'd only struggled for a few months and Eva's child support had allowed him to feed Rachel without her noticing the budget crunch, but there'd been plenty of nights Richard had gone to bed on a few mouthfuls of rice and an anger that had slow-roasted his insides until his nerves were too scorched to sting anymore. Pride and two decades worth of fighting between them, and in the end, Eva had been able to fly away while he'd been left behind to sort through the wreckage of their war.

Either as a result of some hidden trauma from the ordeal or because she liked feeling useful, Rachel had taken over the kitchen by the time she'd entered high school. It'd quickly become apparent that while she hadn't inherited Eva's talent for disaster, she had inherited her love for experimentation. The meals were hits for the most part, and if sometimes the soup tasted a little too sweet or the hamburger meat got a little too spicy, Richard chalked it up to boredom and didn't begrudge her the fun. The results were edible and it beat having to go back to doing the cooking himself.

Seeing as both he and Rachel had mutually struck out that evening with assault and clinical gambling addiction, Richard figured he was hovering somewhere in the karmic middle. Whatever she'd scraped up from the cupboards was probably at least halfway sentient at this point, so he was prepared to keep the peace and not bitch too hard if the flavor was off. Food was food. If it blinked back at you, that only meant you had to eat it faster before it formed sophisticated defense programs.

He held on to this mentality all the way up to the point where he sat down and she served him his plate, at which point every other rationale fled from his head because the food Rachel sat down in front of him wasn't food. "What is that?" Conan breathed at his shoulder, horrified.

"Dinner," Rachel said curtly. "Take a seat, Conan. I'll be back with yours just as soon as I dish it up."

Conan didn't sit. For once Richard didn't bother to clobber him into compliance. Was it noodles? He leaned forward and then quickly backed away from the steam, but not before he caught something green and slime-coated in the middle. "I wish they'd make up their mind about the weather," Rachel said, glancing at the muted TV in the corner as she passed by it. "First they say it's going to be sunny, and all of a sudden it's storming all week. It's been so hard to plan anything with Serena."

He could feel Conan looking at him. "Uh," Richard said. He thought he could see an olive, but when he shifted the noodles aside he was relieved to see it was just additional nuclear waste. Olives ruined any meal, but added special and specific insult to a meal already designed to kill him.

"Sorry, I forgot the sauce." Rachel's voice floated from the kitchen. She emerged with a steaming pot and a ladle, which she used to carefully deposit a second helping of mutagen onto Richard's noodles. "Sit down, Conan," she added, throwing him a frown. "I said yours will be out in a second. Just be patient."

Conan was still looking at him as if urging him to act. Richard was having a hard time pulling his gaze away from the plate. Something about the trainwreck quality of Eva's cooking and her refusal to be poisoned by it while it'd taken down entire city blocks had created a permanent weak spot in him, the way Meguire's elbow bothered him when it rained and their old chief would fly into a rage whenever he heard the opening theme from 'Long Vacation'. "Are you really going to eat it?" Conan asked, well below earshot.

Richard's gaze shifted to the plants in the room without a lot of conviction. Something told him that if he introduced it to the soil the ficus would grow legs. "I won't tell if you throw it out the window," Conan said.

"How about you throw yourself out first and cushion the fall so I don't have to buy a new plate?" Richard said. "Shut up and sit down. If I'm going to die I'm doing it with company."

"Here we are," Rachel announced, returning with two plates before Conan could answer. "There would be more, but _somebody_ decided to feed the horses before he fed his kids."

"For the record, I have _one_ kid, and that kid knocked both my eyeballs into the same socket about an hour ago," Richard said. "How about you slide right on off _your_ horse while you're at it? I already told you I'd get the money back."

"What I did was an accident," Rachel snapped, but her neck flushed and Richard knew she still felt guilty about it. "What _you_ did was on purpose. It's not even close to the same thing."

"Are you guys fighting?" Conan looked excited. "I should probably go so you can work it out, right? I'll just head over to Amy's and give you guys some space."

"Sit _down._ " Rachel's hand was firm as she dragged Conan back, but her voice softened a bit for him. "I know it's not much, but it was the best I could do with the ingredients I had. You have to eat, Conan. You're so little. You need food to grow."

"Yeah, eat, Conan," Richard said, and the glare Conan turned on him was forged in the fires of hell. "In fact, it's only fair that you have my portion too, seeing as this entire thing is my fault. Give me your plate, I'll make sure you grow."

"There's enough for _all_ of us, thank goodness," Rachel sighed, intercepting his hand over Conan's panicked squawk. "Come on, let's just eat. I'm tired and I want to get the dishes done before I go to bed."

Truthfully speaking, Richard was enough of a masochist to be pretty curious at this point. There was actually a decent chance that Rachel still thought she was asleep and had concocted the meal with dream physics, which would account for her faith that something that looked like a warning from the mafia would somehow taste better than it smelled.

Ignoring Conan's incredulous stare, he twirled the noodles into a knot with his fork and watched the oil on them shimmer. He lifted the glob off the plate, jostled it a bit to dislodge some of the sauce, and shoveled it into his mouth, eyes trained toward the ceiling in concentration as he chewed.

The world swooped out from under him, and Richard Moore saw the infinite cosmos and its countless, starlight ellipses trailing off into the far reaches of space. By the time he swung by Venus and landed back inside his own body, he'd forgotten his own name and his fork was empty, which meant the food had slithered down his esophagus independently and was probably already colonizing his stomach. "… for the last time, Conan, you're not going to Amy's and you're not skipping dinner to do your homework," Rachel was saying, exasperated. "Look, I even brought home cookies for dessert. You can have some if you clean your plate."

"Hey, Rachel." The normalcy of his own voice surprised him. "You mind grabbing me some pepper?"

"Pepper?" Rachel looked a little taken aback. "That's a first. You always ask for salt."

"Trying to watch my blood pressure."

The flicker of Rachel's expression told him that bullshit hadn't gone unnoticed, but she played along enough to ask, "You don't think it'll be too much with the sauce?"

"Nah, I think it'll bring out its natural flavor. You think so too, don't you, brat?"

Conan had been goggling at him. At this he jerked in surprise. "Huh?"

"Pepper. She should go get some. To bring out the flavor."

"I don't think that's really gonna—" Conan trailed off when he read Richard's expression. "Oh, _right._ Right! Pepper! Mm, yummy. I love pepper."

"See?" Richard told Rachel. "Would you mind snagging it for us? I'd do it, but I'm feeling kind of sore for some reason."

Once again her expression spoke volumes, but the crime was ultimately too new for her to be able to blow off the guilt trip. With a sigh, she pushed away and stood. "I think it's up in the cupboard somewhere," Richard said helpfully. "Top shelf, behind all the spices."

"I know where the pepper is, Dad." Rachel's tone was curt. She crossed the room, sidestepping Conan's book bag, and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment later the cupboard door opened and bottles began rattling.

Conan was still incredulous. "You're not really gonna eat this, are you?" he hissed.

Richard was on a mission from St. Jude. He scooped up his plate and hid it behind the TV, then came back to wrestle the fork out of Conan's hand. Before Conan could react, Richard picked up his plate and dumped the contents directly onto the kid's head, muffling Conan's horrified shriek behind a waterfall of noodles. "There, I just saved your life," Richard said. "Go take a bath, shrimp."

Conan emerged with a sputter, clawing the mess from his eyes. "You could've just thrown it out the window and pretended I spilled it!"

"Yeah, but then I wouldn't have gotten to smash dinner on your face." Richard was already striding to the kitchen. "Don't get noodles in my tub."

Rachel was still half-hidden in the cupboards when he came in, on her tiptoes as she noisily sorted through the array of bottles on top. Richard stood like an asshole directly on the other side of the door until she closed it and turned to smack directly into him. "Hey, let me tell you a story," Richard said. "It's a really good one. It's about a successful businessman who was actually a private detective, and he lived somewhere around here, and his name is 'Dad' and he's in the kitchen, and dinner is gross."

"Dad, for the last time, I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's all I could do," Rachel said, exasperated. "Just take the pepper and use it to cover up the taste if it's so bad."

"I would, except pepper was a diversionary tactic. Dinner escaped out the window on three legs just a second ago."

"You _threw it out_?"

"It was child abuse. And elder abuse. Let's just order—"

Rachel let the pepper shaker fall to shatter on the kitchen floor and turned to bury her face in her hands.

Taken aback, Richard stopped mid-sentence. He expected her to apologize and run for the broom, but for once Rachel didn't seem to care about the mess. She continued to stand with her back to him, breathing deeply against the barrier of her hands, not moving as the seconds ticked by on the overhead clock.

Suddenly, terrifyingly, expertly aware that he'd fucked up something important, Richard lifted a hand to touch her shoulder and hesitated halfway there. "You're so awful, Dad," Rachel whispered. "All the time. _All the time._ "

"Yeah, but usually…" He trailed off. He reached for her shoulder a second time, then chickened out, instead poking her gently in the spine. "Usually when I'm awful, you just clobber me back in time."

"I don't want to hurt you."

That struck him as weirdly poignant. Richard burned some rust off his mental gears as he stared at her back, trying to decipher the tone. By all rights Rachel should have sounded angry, but instead she just sounded tearful and exhausted.

 _Where did I,_ Richard thought, and lifted his hand again to ease her hair aside, a breath from making contact with her shoulder. _When was it that I—_

Rachel spun. Richard jerked with surprise, still half-expecting to get belted, but what Rachel did then was infinitely worse: she crashed directly into him, heels sending up a wave of pepper by their ankles, and buried her face against his chest to weep. "Oh, shit," Richard said.

Rachel was muffled. "Why couldn't you just eat dinner, Dad?"

He felt his arms move on their own, taking her up in them. It took him nearly a full minute to find words. "Because it was gross, hon."

"I don't have any ingredients left. We're out of everything."

"We'll order out."

"We don't have any money."

"You think I seriously keep my entire life's savings under the floorboards? Give me a break. We've got money."

"But you took the last of our grocery funds from the vent."

"We've _got money_. If you stop slobbering on me I'll go out and pull it from the account."

He heard her snuffle through a clogged nose. After a moment she pulled away slightly, examining him with a single suspicious eye. "Look, whatever you think of me, I'm kind of a handsome genius," Richard said. "And whatever you think of your mother, she knows how to throw money at a problem until it rolls over and barks. Just because you don't see the support doesn't mean it isn't there, all right?"

Rachel looked genuinely startled. "Mom pays child support?"

"You think _I_ ponied up for you to go on that school trip to the aquarium? Get real. The only tail I'm interested in is walking by me on the sidewalk, not swimming in the water."

"Dad, _gross,_ " she snapped, but she was too focused to be thrown off the scent. "But why does she pay child support? I mean, you guys aren't actually divorced, are you?"

No? Sort of? Richard felt his temple start to throb. "Look, I'll stop stealing the grocery money. Okay? I promise. If I'd known it was going to make you snobble like this, I would've just rented out your room during the day for extra funds instead."

Rachel didn't respond. She turned her head until her temple settled against his chest, and once again her expression was hidden from view. "That was a joke," Richard said after a beat, just to clarify.

"I know, Dad." She sounded tired again.

"A funny joke. One of the ha-ha ones."

"Ha-ha."

He waited for milk to riotously squirt from her nose, then remembered he'd taken the grocery money and therefore there was no milk in the fridge, and also this wasn't funny. It was probably the direct opposite of that.

Instead he held her for as long as she wanted to be held, listening to Conan poorly hide a tirade of expletives under the noise of the bathroom fan down the hall, and wondered where exactly his day had swerved off the tracks and exploded. Looking back, he could barely recall what he'd even been trying to accomplish that morning. It all seemed murky in hindsight.

When he felt her stir, he let her go and stepped back, then nearly met an uninspiring death when his heel slipped on the settled layer of pepper. "I'm sorry," Rachel said, hastily catching his arm. Her face was splotchy, but the tear tracks disappeared under a brusque swipe of her sleeve. "I'll clean this up. Where's Conan?"

"Washing off his dinner in the bathroom." And swearing better than Richard had at that age, which actually angled Richard's opinion of him upwards a few degrees. "Don't worry about it."

Rachel had already been halfway across the room to retrieve the dustpan. She paused at this, mouth opening to ask, then read his expression and deflated with a sigh. "I'm gonna go grab some cash," Richard said. "You gonna live if I duck out?"

"Yes, Dad."

"You sure?"

"Why are you asking?" She needled him with an unpleasant look as she took a knee. "Are you going to help clean up if I say no?"

He obviously had no intention of doing that. Why _was_ he asking? Suddenly stymied, unsure of exactly what it was that was holding him up, Richard stared down at her with a frown, rusty gears still turning.

Busy sweeping glass into the pan, Rachel glanced up and visibly softened at whatever expression was on his face. "Just get something while you're out, okay? Let's just skip the middle step."

"You don't want to order out?"

"It's the same thing, isn't it? Besides, if you factor in all the time it'll take for us to order it and the restaurant to deliver it, Conan will be late for bed."

"Right," Richard said. "I sincerely care about that."

"Good." The gimlet eye was back. "Me too. I like when we agree."

Richard took this as his cue to get the hell out. He paused at the doorframe, tapping it restlessly with his fingertips. "If the salt shaker comes seeking revenge for its fallen partner, shoot first and ask questions later. I'll help you bury the evidence."

He finally saw Rachel's back jerk in a jolt of surprised laughter, but she primly kept her back to him so he couldn't see her face.

Feeling a little better about leaving her on her own, Richard threw on a jacket and scrounged up his keys, then detoured to the bathroom to pound on the door like a dick while Conan shrieked with fear on the other side. "Hey, bathroom hog, I'm going out," Richard called. "What do you want?"

" _I wouldn't be taking it up if it wasn't for you!_ "

"Hurry up and tell me what you want or I'm bringing you home egg whites and cottage cheese."

There was silence on the other end for a moment. " _Are you serious?_ " Conan said, sounding cautious and a little surprised. " _You're asking me what_ I _want?_ _Really?_ "

"Three, two—"

" _Okay, okay!_ " Something splashed, followed by a rattle and the slap of little feet on a damp floor. Closer to the door, Conan asked, " _Can we get curry?_ "

Richard had fully resigned himself to picking up hamburgers, because Conan was seven years old and seven year-olds were contractually obligated to be boring. The choice pleasantly surprised him. "Noodles or rice?"

" _Rice._ "

Hot damn. Between the swearing and the sophisticated palette, Richard could almost bring himself not to resent the kid he was feeding and housing for free. He drew out money at a convenience store three blocks down, then parked himself against the wall in the alley and worked his way through two cigarettes while the restaurant next door prepared the food.

He was shivering by the time they brought it out to him, having to force his stiff fingers to curl around the handles of the bag in order to carry it home. Either because they were weak from near-fatal poisoning or just exhausted from the trauma in general, Rachel and Conan were both head-nodding by the time they worked their way through their share. Richard sent them off to bed with his foot, generously consenting to dump the dirty dishes in the sink for one of them to deal with later, and retreated down the stairs to his office to finish the rest of the day on his own terms.

Normally a decisive slacker, Richard didn't uncover the flaws in this plan until he realized just how keyed up he was. He flipped between an action movie and a late-night talk show as his beer supply dwindled, too apathetic to scrounge up the channel guide to end his purgatory. By the time both shows were over, the headache from the previous day was back and his neck was itching badly enough that he was half-tempted to peel off his skin and rip out the nerves.

 _What,_ he thought, feeling crumbs scritch under his forehead as he set it against the top of his desk, _the hell is wrong with me._ Shellfish was the only thing he knew of that could mess him up this badly, and he hadn't been near one since he was in elementary school. Was he having a reaction to something from the take-out? Some kind of residual stress caused by the case?

He hadn't realized he'd successfully dozed off until he woke with a start somewhere near midnight. His shoulders and lower back muscles bawled as he shifted to rub the side of his mouth dry, angling his ear towards the ceiling to try to pick up the noise.

Sure enough the sound came again – a soft thump followed by what sounded like Rachel's voice, but then the crowd noise swelled from the television speaker, and once he'd muted it the noises upstairs had stopped. Most likely she'd headed out into the kitchen for a snack and had chipmunked it back into her room.

His back was aching too much to fall asleep again at his desk. Groggy, Richard fumbled for the remote and found the power button. The room plunged into darkness.

He could aim for his bed but had a feeling he would just splat on the stairs. Richard settled for a happy medium, staggering up enough to plummet over the back of the couch and land half-assedly on the cushions. The pillow was missing, but that's what elbows were for. He crooked one under his head, buried his nose in the nearest cushion, and let himself slowly sink back down into a doze.

Rachel's scream ricocheted down through the vents. " _Dad!_ "

Richard's superhero reflex was to leap directly through the ceiling, which meant his mortal body tripped and crashed over the coffee table for the second time that day. This time he heard something snap and had a split second to think _can that please not have been my fucking hip,_ but a sideways roll and a splintery shanking later he realized the leg of the table had broken off. He clawed his way out of the wreckage as another scream rent the silence, yanking open the office door and taking the stairs up to the apartment by twos.

The lights were on and Conan was already in her room by the time Richard made it in. His glasses were missing, his hair a chaotic nest of cowlicks. He was perched on the edge of Rachel's bed, shaking her shoulder and calling her name sharply.

Reflex moved Richard before he could think. He lunged forward, grabbing Conan off the bed and turning his own body just in time to shield the kid from a wayward fist. He then promptly dumped Conan out of reach, ignoring the yelp as he hit the floor, and turned to address her himself. This time he was ready, keeping an expert eye on her hands and deflecting the blows that came too close to his face, emptying his lungs so she couldn't knock the wind out of him with the others. "I tried to wake her up," Conan gasped from behind him, hovering in his periphery like a fruit fly. "I tried saying her name but—"

He didn't have concentration to spare. Rachel was as much of a black belt as he was and he wasn't particularly interested in having his nose relocated down his throat. Taking a chance, Richard deflected another blow before taking her face between his hands and yelled, " _I'm getting you a puppy!_ "

The screaming stopped. Rachel hiccupped once, made as if to fight again, then without warning surged awake with a gasp. "A really fat, ugly one that chews on everything, but especially the stuff you love most, like the picture of you and Kudo," Richard said. "You'll hate it so much you'll have nightmares of me _not_ getting rid of it."

"Dad," Rachel choked out, eyes wide with tears, and for the second time that day lunged up to throw her arms around him.

Richard absently lifted a hand and settled it on her back, staring at the wall as his mind raced. He heard Conan puttering around behind him, flipping on lamps and string lights where he found them, flooding the shadow out of the room. "You're alive," Rachel whispered.

"Why wouldn't I be, huh?" He turned his head a little, caught Conan's eye, mouthed 'water'. Conan nodded and ran off. "Just a dream, kid."

Rachel didn't respond, burying her face deeper against his shoulder.

Richard wavered between worry and exasperation as he tried to think of a way to soothe her out of this latest paranoia. Conan eventually returned with a glass, nearly tripping over the threshold and creating a new ocean in his haste. "Here, Rachel," he said, recovering, and held it up for her to take. "Drink this. It'll make you feel better."

"You didn't have to fill it to the brim, you moron," Richard said.

Rachel disentangled herself from him. She wiped her face with both palms and summoned a watery smile. "Thank you, Conan, that's sweet."

"Are you okay?" Conan asked. Richard noticed he'd had taken the time to grab his glasses sometime between the dash to the kitchen and back, which struck him as odd considering Conan's urgency earlier. "That must have been some dream."

"Yeah, I guess so." She laughed a little against the surface of the water before taking several quick, tremulous sips. "I'm sorry if I scared you."

The silence sat a minute while they both watched her drink. Eventually Conan withdrew a bit to bounce on his heels, stealing an expectant glance at Richard. "What?" Richard said. "What are you looking at me for? You want me to break out the monster-be-gone spray? Should still be around here somewhere."

"Dad, don't tell him about that," Rachel snapped, flushing. "Conan, I'm fine. Don't listen to him."

"It was a can of air freshener," Richard told him. "I literally just slapped a post-it note on it and markered-in 'Monster-Be-Gone'. She wouldn't even let me go near the light switch until I treated the whole room."

"Dad, _knock it off!_ "

"Rachel." Conan's expression was serious. He looked like a tiny psychiatrist in his glasses and one of Richard's old oversized white shirts, standing attentively at the side of her bed. "If you need to talk about it, we'll listen."

"I don't need to talk about it." Rachel curled a bit around her water. Her thumb ran up and down the glass, making streaks in the condensation, before she abruptly set it aside on her bedside table. "It was just a nightmare. They don't mean anything anyway."

"Who says? You're always telling me it's okay to be afraid of things. Why not talk to us while we're here? Maybe it'll make you feel better."

"What's this 'we' business all of a sudden?" Richard said, irritated by Conan's casual command of the situation. "Why are you even in here? Did you fall out of your crib or something?"

"She was screaming and it's not like a real man was around to do anything about it, so I stepped in."

Holy shit. Richard promptly forgot his earlier intention to protect the kid from Rachel's karate and grabbed him with the intention of Judo-throwing him out the window. "Dad, _stop it._ " Rachel pried a squawking Conan out of his grip. "I'm _fine_ , you two. It was just a dream. Honestly, it's already hazy. Let's just all go back to sleep."

"Sure." Wide-awake with his blood pressure cranked up to 180/explosion. He'd be lucky to be asleep by next Christmas. "Make sure and shut all these lights off so you don't jack up the energy bill. I'm going back downstairs."

Rachel lunged forward to grab his arm as he tried to walk away, nearly yanking it out of his socket. "Wait," she stammered. "You're not staying up here?"

"Kid still reeks of rotten noodles and avocado mutagen. I'd be twofloors away if I could swing it. Just stomp if you need me."

"Dad, please don't go back downstairs. It's late. Can't you sleep in your room?"

"Why do you care? You just said it was only a dream. Shake it off."

Rachel's fingers tightened on his arm when he tried to walk away. This time Richard stopped and looked at her, _really_ looked, and she shrank under his scrutiny. "Unless this is something else, and we've got something else to talk about," he said.

Rachel's eyes flickered to Conan. _Too bad._ If this was actually something serious, he could care less about Rachel wanting to look tough in front of an audience. "No," she said softly.

Fine. Though if he was being honest with himself, the reminder that Conan was still there, watching their interaction with the sudden silent intensity of an owl, kind of threw him as well. Sometimes it was impossible to avoid tripping over him and other times it was just as easy to forget he'd become a semi-permanent fixture at their feet.

Suddenly painfully aware that maybe his daughter deserved more than a fluid ounce of compassion from a water glass someone else had fetched her, Richard cleared his throat and reconsidered his hard-ass stance. It really wouldn't cost him anything to offer to watch a late night program or something with her to take her mind off it. There was probably a bag or two of popcorn holed up somewhere. They could even invite the brat, and somewhere in this whole abnormal stupid mess, something normal might emerge if he squinted hard enough for it.

Before he could suggest any one of these things, Rachel blurted, "Would it be okay if I slept in your room tonight?"

His compassion died with a scream. "Rachel, you're not ten. Just let it go."

" _Please_ , Dad. We sleep in the same room all the time when we're on vacation. I'll bring in my blankets, I'll sleep on the floor—"

"You had a bad dream. Nothing's going to get you. Look, why don't we all just—"

"I'm _not,_ " Rachel blurted, then deflated, fiddling with her fingers in her lap. She suddenly couldn't seem to look at him anymore. "It's not me I'm worried about monsters getting."

Conan was looking at him again, hard-eyed behind the glint of his glasses.

 _What._ For god's sake, he was trying. It wasn't his fault everyone in the world had suddenly reverted to using baseball signals instead of human speech. Rachel had been terrified of ghosts as a kid, sure, but once he'd cooked up the monster spray thing that'd mostly fell by the wayside. This was vastly outside the realm of his personal parenting skills. "You know, I was kind of spooked going to bed tonight too," Conan said abruptly. "Would you mind if I slept in here with you, Rachel? It'd sure make me feel better."

Startled, Rachel blinked red-rimmed eyes at him. "Really?"

"Sure. It can be like we're camping. I can bring in my blankets and sleep right next to your bed. We can even keep one of the flashlights on so it won't be so scary."

Richard watched Rachel slowly brighten, the glitter of tears in her eyes disappearing with another swipe of her palm. "That sounds like a great idea, Conan," she admitted, laughing with relief. "But come on, there's no need to sleep on the floor. The bed is more than big enough for the both of us. Here, come on up."

The color dropped out of Conan's face. Before he could dodge, Rachel had hooked her hands under his arms and hefted him up beside her on the mattress, rearranging the blankets to include him. "There!" she said cheerfully. "Isn't this cozy? Like a slumber party! That way neither of us will be alone."

Conan turned a wide-eyed gaze to Richard. In some distant part of his brain that wasn't explosively pissed at this detour, Richard reflected that Conan hadn't looked half as terrified when they'd been stranded on a boat full of murderers. "Comfortable, brat?" Richard growled.

"Eh heh heh," Conan said. He looked like he desperately wished to be anywhere else.

"We're all comfy now, Dad, thanks." Rachel wriggled down with satisfaction under the covers and repositioned the pillows, giving Conan one for his own use. "Good night."

Richard continued to glare at Conan. "Good night," Richard said between gritted teeth.

"Good night," Conan whispered, somewhere from the abyss.

Richard went downstairs and tried to get wasted on the remaining two cans of beer in his study. By the time he realized distraction was futile and nothing could help him, it was halfway to morning and his office felt like exile rather than escape, which defeated the purpose. He thumped back upstairs to find Rachel's door still slightly ajar, moonlight spilling from the crack to pool in the hallway.

He needed to catapult himself in the direction of his bed pretty urgently, but he had enough agency to stop at her doorframe, leaning against it to check and see if she was all right. When his eyes finally adjusted, he realized that he'd partially mistaken the source of light. Conan had worked his way out from under the sheets, leaving a flashlight nestled next to Rachel in his place. He was sitting on the end of her bed, legs dangling, face tilted towards the uncovered window. His glasses were perched on his knee, his face open and tired under the slant of the moon.

There was something starting to churn in his stomach that wasn't cheap beer. Richard stood there in the hallway for a long time, watching an abandoned seven year-old keep watch over his seventeen year-old daughter. When Rachel stirred in her sleep, making a soft sound in his voice that sounded halfway between _wait_ and something like _Jimmy,_ the little hand moved, resting atop her ankle over the cocoon of blankets. Conan didn't say anything, but a few seconds later Rachel had calmed again, shifting enough so that the beam of the flashlight fell on the opposite wall.

When staying vertical proved too much of a challenge, Richard pushed himself off the doorframe and stumbled the rest of the way to bed. His neck itched something stupid.

* * *

.

So several thoughts were going through Richard's head while the formerly sweet, busty amnesiac Maya strangled him to death from above with a wire. The most prevalent of which was _this actually isn't a bad way to die_ but also prevalent was the recurring thought, _so what the hell is wrong with my daughter anyway._

He didn't make a habit of butting into Rachel's affairs so long as they didn't involve drugs or sex. She was old enough to fight her own battles, and the ones she didneed help fighting she tended to tell him about. Her not being particularly interested in doing either was something he hadn't encountered before, which meant his list of options was at once fairly short and terrifyingly infinite.

He'd pretty much blacked out by the time Maya dropped him, so it was a pleasant surprise to find out later on that he'd lived through the ordeal. The police came, arrests were made in the case, nobody died, and one of the officers drove the family home for free, which really was the cherry atop any day.

Feeling pretty good about most things, Richard celebrated by binging at his desk and crashing in a philosophical heap on the couch while Rachel did her homework upstairs. When the evening had wound down and both kids were getting ready for bed, Richard's buzz had faded and reality was back on his plate, which meant he had to clear the table to make room for the rest of his plans.

He braced himself with a drink stiff enough to peel paint, spent time dawdling on the toilet, and sat back down at his desk to call his wife. " _Well,_ _I don't know about you, but_ I _feel this is progress_ ," Eva purred, reassuringly bitchy on the other side of Beika. " _You know what they say: embracing your faults builds strength of character._ "

"You want to talk about strength training, how about you get off your hams and find a gym somewhere instead of letting your mouth do all the running for you?"

" _Thanks for your concern, but I got all the exercise I ever needed running away from you. Does this call have a point? I'll have you remember that I don't make a habit of taking pointless cases._ "

"If I thought you were any good at winning, I'd stop only sending the clients I hate," Richard said. "Look, I don't want to be on the phone any more than you do, but we've got business."

" _Isn't it your usual bingeing hour? Should I be flattered that you found the time to contact me during the six o'clock brews?_ "

… that jab was pretty lame considering Eva's ability to stab him through the bone, which meant she was relaxed enough to consider this play. Most of their interactions reminded Richard of wolves gnawing on each other's necks to assert dominance before something larger came along to break them up. It'd been good foreplay back in the day and cause for noise complaints when it got too good, but other times it was awkward and mean and hard to figure out if first blood meant a win or a loss.

He recalibrated his approach. "Calling to check in on a few things. You got time or not?"

" _I've been meaning to discuss something with you, actually. I suppose this is as good a time as any. Are you alone in the room?_ "

"Yeah."

" _Put me on speaker so you can concentrate._ "

Richard toggled the function, then leaned back to fish his cigarettes out of his desk. Eva waited with uncanny prescience while he lit up, waiting until he blew out his first plume to speak again. " _I've been thinking about that little boy you asked me to research last month,_ " Eva said. " _There was one question I never got the chance to ask you. Why was it you were so interested in him, if I may ask? Did you notice something unusual about him?_ "

" _That's_ the big question you've been sitting on all this time?"

" _You have to admit it was unusual for you._ "

"Just curious."

" _Richard, for god's sake, no you weren't,_ " Eva said. " _Unless a mystery is skirt-shaped or breast-shaped, I can promise you that you're not actually invested in getting to the bottom of it. I want to know why that was the exception._ "

"Hey, I solve things," Richard said. "Why are we even talking about this? You trying to pick a fight?"

" _I'm trying to get a real answer from you. Heaven forbid you actually cooperate._ "

"Look, it's not a crime to make sure I'm not throwing the kid back into some kind of war zone, all right? Rachel already got attached anyway, so it wasn't like she was gonna let me kick him out either. My hands are tied."

" _If you're so concerned, call social services on them. I'm assuming you got the contact information from the parents when they came to—_ "

Richard watched the cigarette smoke waft to the ceiling and dissipate with a few hard strokes of the ceiling fan. " _Wait a minute,_ " Eva said. " _What do you mean, your hands_ are _tied? He isn't still there, is he?_ "

Richard tried to figure out if a square-shaped mouth could blow a square-shaped smoke ring. " _Oh for heaven's sake,_ " Eva exploded. " _Richard, what were you thinking? Are you out of your mind?_ "

"Listen, it's not a big deal," Richard said, bored. "The kid's just hanging out here for a while. He'll get fed up eventually and run home on his own. He says he's Agasa's relative or whatever anyway, so at least somebody knows he's here."

" _If he's Agasa's relative, he needs to be_ staying with Agasa. _You can't possibly be drunk enough to think this is acceptable. This is someone else's child!_ "

"Yeah, looks like they're real eager to get him back, doesn't it."

" _That doesn't matter. You_ know _how this looks. How could you be so stupid?_ "

"Look, you wanna tell me they don't know exactly where he is with Agasa in the loop? You think I'd be doing him a favor throwing him back to people who don't even care enough to pick him up?"

" _I think he deserves to have a shot through the proper channels, with the proper procedure, and it shouldn't be up to_ you _to decide what support he receives and doesn't receive. You didn't find some lost kitten in the woods, Richard. This is a_ human child."

Cornered, abruptly angry, Richard smashed his unfinished cigarette down in the tray and braced his forehead in his hands. He spared a thought for whether or not the conversation might be traveling up through the vents, but he could hear the faint thrumming of the shower overhead and remembered that he shouldn't care if he was being overheard anyway. His apartment. His agency. His life. " _Richard, regardless of whatever inspired this… frankly uncharacteristic compassion from you, it's misplaced,_ " Eva said, making an audible attempt to be the reasonable party. " _You know what you have to do. He needs to be with his family._ "

"Shut up." He didn't lift his head. "You're not even here. What the hell do you know."

" _I know about law and procedure and how brutally the courts will savage you if they think you've been keeping him there against his will._ "

"Sucks to be me."

" _Richard, for once in your life, please set aside your ego and understand that I'm trying to help you,_ " Eva said. " _Tell me what I'm missing._ _Why haven't you contacted social services? What are you waiting for?_ "

Richard didn't answer for a while. That really was the question it all came down to. _What are you waiting for._ He wanted to cut Conan out like a cancer and get back to living life in remission. Except deep down, packed away in the memories of what it was like to be afraid of everything and too small to do anything about it, he knew that he had zero intentions of throwing Conan back if he wasn't reasonably sure it was safe. Conan didn't exhibit the traditional signs of abuse, but it didn't matter. A month later, it wasn't so easy to just kick the kid out the door and forget about it. Now there were… complications. Or at least, now things weren't so clear-cut.

Eva's voice had gone soft. " _Richard, talk to me._ "

"I don't know."

" _You can't keep this up._ "

"Doing all right so far."

" _The longer he stays, the harder it'll be on him and Rachel. And you._ "

"I'll deal with it."

There was a long, long silence. Richard could hear his wife's soft, even breathing, but her office was quiet around her. She must have shut the door sometime during the call. " _Fine,_ " she sighed. " _Keep your cards to yourself. I'll start up the search again and call if you something turns up._ "

"Thanks."

" _Don't expect me to bail you out if this goes south. This is all on you._ "

He very nearly responded with something ruinous. It took everything in him to keep the anger down where it'd lived for the past ten years: boiling his blood and searing his stomach until the point he could temporarily quench it again with his next drink. He managed to suppress it by the barest of margins, but the near-miss of apocalypse made him shake.

He grabbed another cigarette to calm his nerves. " _Anyway, was there something you needed to tell me?_ " Eva asked.

"Yeah, don't hang up. Got one more thing to talk to you about."

" _Let me guess: you scraped up another abandoned runaway off the streets._ "

"Sure," he said. "Or we could talk about the kid you abandoned and keep the narrative short."

He instantly felt the room on the other end plunge into an iced-over hell. " _Don't start with me,_ " Eva said, very quietly.

"Fine." It'd been below the belt anyway. "You wouldn't have happened to have spoken to her this week, have you?"

Another brief, infuriated silence. He knew what it cost her to admit, still stiff and still deadly, " _I haven't had time to call her this week yet._ _Why?_ "

"She had a little episode last night. The uh…" Richard rolled his eyes up to the ceiling for a while, trying to land on phrasing that wouldn't have his wife immediately coming over via rescue helicopter. "Bad dream kind. It's been a while, so I wondered if she'd said anything to you."

" _She had a nightmare?_ "

"Last night, but she's been weird all week. Look, if she hasn't said anything, never mind. Forget I asked."

" _Damn it, Dick, you won't be coy about matters involving our daughter,_ " Eva snapped. " _Rachel hasn't had nightmares since she was a little girl. I_ _told_ _you it wasn't good for her to be exposed to all this violence._ "

"Look, that's not necessarily the only thing bothering her. It could be something else."

" _What else could it possibly be?_ "

"Kudo."

He could feel the momentum of her anger derail instantly. Jimmy was at the top of the very short list of things he and his wife agreed on. Neither of them put much stock in their parenting, but they were both fairly sure they'd at least taken a better stab at it than the Kudos. Richard had lost track of the number of times Jimmy had crashed over at the agency during middle school because his parents had nabbed some red-eye to Portugal or Egypt and had forgotten to make accommodations for their underage kid. With Jimmy recently turning seventeen, the neglect had become merely shitty instead of criminal, which meant it'd taken them nearly two weeks to notice Jimmy was missing at all. " _He hasn't turned up?_ " Eva asked quietly. " _I've been checking the news, but the only articles have been editorials about how you're 'taking his place'._ _Nothing to show that anyone's actually concerned about him._ "

"Dipshit calls her to keep her on the hook, but he hasn't been in school in a month. Something about an overseas case."

" _So he is calling,_ " Eva sighed. " _That's something, at least. How does he sound on the phone?_ "

"I don't talk to him."

" _But Rachel does? How does she look after he calls?_ "

"I dunno." Happy? Depressed? The whole situation gave Richard a migraine. It was the stupidest shit he'd had to deal with this year, and that was saying something. "Up and down. She's been taking it one call at a time."

He heard Eva's pen working against her desk: the distinctive clack of the tip being depressed over and over. " _I'll take her out to lunch this weekend,_ " Eva said abruptly, decisively. " _It's about that time anyway. I'll bring it up to her and see what I get._ "

"Thanks. Just let me know if it's something I can deal with on this end."

" _I have a few ideas to start. Maybe… oh, I don't know, shielding her from the day-to-day violence? Like the sight of her father nearly dying of asphyxiation?_ "

He was interested despite himself. "You heard about that?"

" _Yes, and I was jealous I didn't think of it first,_ " Eva said. " _You really are a reckless idiot, Richard. Thank god you had Joseph to back you up._ "

"Hey, I solved that case, not him. And in case you forgot, I did it with an assassin's wire wrapped around my goddamn throat. I think the most duress you've ever been under while closing a case has been cramps."

" _And I'd still prefer being strangled with wire, which tells you something about being a woman,_ " Eva said. " _Just go to bed. I can smell the booze on you from across the city._ _Did you at least have dinner?_ "

"Why? You're not thinking of sending something over, are you?"

" _And why not? It's been a while since Rachel had her mother's cooking._ "

"Yeah, which is exactly why she survived into her teens," Richard said, frowning. "Don't give her more shit to wake up screaming over."

" _And to think I was just starting to forget exactly why I'm over here and you're over there. Thank you for reminding me. I'm hanging up. I'll contact you later._ "

"G'night."

" _Go to bed, Richard,_ " Eva said as he was preparing to pull the receiver from his ear. Her voice had grown inexplicably soft again. " _Not your desk. Not the couch. Go upstairs and sleep._ "

The butt of the cigarette was perilously close to burning his fingers, but he suddenly couldn't seem to summon up the energy to move. He felt strangely exhausted, as though this had been a marathon instead of a fifteen minute phone conversation with his wife. As if the mention of it had reminded it of its job, the mark on his neck where Maya's wire had dug in began throbbing again in time with his heartbeat. " _I don't,_ " Eva said, " _particularly feel the need to see that kind of report about you on the evening news again. Please try to be more considerate in the future._ "

"Okay," he said blankly.

She hung up with a soft click. Perplexed, Richard listened to the dial tone for a while as the shower faucet finally squeaked and shut off overhead. When the cigarette started burning the sides of his fingers, he dug it into the ashtray and went back upstairs to watch the season three premiere of Torrential Hearts.

* * *

 _Thanks to CloudyDayJoy for the lovely review on the last chapter, and thanks to those reading/reviewing via my cross-post on AO3. I cherish all feedback!_


	5. Chapter 5

There were roughly 7.5 billion people on the planet he could safely ignore a call from at seven a.m and exactly two that he couldn't, so after he hung up the phone he threw on some pants while Rachel ruined his coffee in the kitchen. "Dad, just go back to bed," she sighed for the fifth time, sparing a tight-lipped look at him when he accidentally barked his hip off the corner of the table. "All this running around without sleep is really bad for your heart."

Starvation was also bad for his heart, so Richard course-corrected by appropriating Conan's toast just before the kid took his first bite. He crammed half of the slice in his mouth and eeled by Rachel, blinking sleep from his eyes, rescuing the pot from the burner before the contents critical-massed. "Of course, then I'm enabling you by making you coffee, which is _also_ bad for your heart," Rachel muttered, setting two more slices of bread into the toaster and depressing the handle with a jerk. "So I guess both of us flunk this morning."

He spoke around a full mouth as he searched for a hotpad. "You actually looking for answers or just spouting off to the universe?"

"Just talking to myself as usual," Rachel said sweetly. She fetched his usual mug from the cupboard and shut the door, then banged the mug down unexpectedly atop the counter, which coincidentally brought him closer to cardiac arrest than his sleep deprivation. "I'm going to fix my hair," she said, again presumably to nobody, and left the kitchen with the toast still browning. Within moments the bathroom door crashed shut down the hall.

Richard counted a full twelve seconds of speeding violations before his heartbeat calmed. He chewed and swallowed his last mouthful, then said, " _Now_ what did you do to her?"

"She has a test today she hasn't had time to study for." Conan had already slid off his stool and was stooping by his backpack to roll a spare sweatshirt into it. Richard caught a glimpse of what looked like a high school textbook and a gaudy pair of athletic shoes before Conan swiftly zipped it up. "Plus she hasn't exactly been getting a lot of sleep either. In case you hadn't noticed."

He'd noticed. More important was Conan's snotty assumption that he hadn't, which merited correctional force somewhere between tossing him out the window and lobbing a packet of soy sauce at his head.

Before Richard could decide which was more instructive, Conan had shouldered his backpack and started heading towards the kitchen door, checking his watch in transit. He clearly intended to leave for school ahead of Rachel. "Hold up, squirt." Richard finally located a hotpad in the cupboard adjacent to the stove and set the pot down on it, hissing when his knuckle brushed the glass. He cranked his head over his shoulder until he found Conan's gaze. "She's got toast in for you."

"I _had_ toast already," Conan said sourly. "Somebody ate it."

"Rules of the animal kingdom: the strong get to eat first." The coffee looked potent enough to melt through the space-time continuum. Richard delayed death by searching for creamer in the refrigerator. "Just siddown and wait your turn."

"It's okay. I don't like toast anyway."

He located the creamer on the second shelf, shut the door, and crossed the room in two strides to snatch the kid up by the back of his jacket just before he scooted out of dodge. "Look, you go off without her and she'll blow another gasket, and _I'm_ the one that has to listen to it," Richard said, depositing him back on the stool. "Just park until breakfast is ready."

"I don't _like toast_." Conan's face was a little splotchy – either anger or embarrassment at being handled. "And I can go to school by myself. I'm not a baby."

"Damn straight you're not, which is the only reason you're here backsassing me in my kitchen instead of getting left at the nearest fire station." Would this put him over? Richard craned his neck to look at the clock as he caught a slice of toast, calculating the equation of travel time equal to or greater than the fucks he gave.

In the end algebra lost to laziness. He relaxed his pace, stealing the second slice for himself and storing it between his teeth while he rummaged through the back of the spice cabinet. He could feel the intensity of Conan's glare tattooing middle fingers into his back as he worked himself out again, which did actually raise a few flags on the pole. He wasn't stupid enough to ever assume any of Conan's respect towards him was genuine, but most days Conan made an attempt to be likeable enough to fly under the radar. Something about this rare and open antagonism, like Conan was ready to burst through the bars and take his fellow inmates down with him in the revolt, felt more genuine than any smile the kid had given him in the past five weeks.

Richard decided to humor him. He chewed and swallowed the last of his own toast before hunting down the butter, scraping a layer onto Conan's slice and tossing the knife into the sink for Rachel to deal with later. He did pause long enough to check inside the bottle to make sure nothing had mutated over the past several years, but all in all sugar tended to stay apocalypse-proof.

He dumped on a generous coating over the butter, plopped it on a plate, and thrust it in Conan's direction. "No thanks," Conan said.

"Yeah thanks. Take it."

"What is it?"

"Toast. Take it."

"What did you put on it?"

"Rat poison and amphetamines. You want this in your mouth or on your head? Because one way or another it's not going to be in my hand in two seconds."

Conan took it. Charity work completed for the next four to six weeks, Richard turned back to the issue of his coffee. It still looked somewhere between an arctic oil spill and the stream he produced during a bladder infection, which actually did raise some survival-related questions. He could brew another pot, but at the end of the day, coffee had been invented to serve as fuel. Cars didn't care what was put into their tanks so long as it got them further down the road, so where did he get off being picky?

He stole a glance over his shoulder as he nabbed the creamer. Conan was still regarding the toast with the expression of someone who wasn't sure the venomous snake they were holding was completely dead. "Look, I'm not gonna kill you in my own kitchen," Richard said. "It's too much work to clean up the evidence."

"It could be something that kills me slowly, so I die in another, less incriminating spot."

"Which would still show up on the post-mortem screening, and what the hell kind of seven year-old uses the word 'incriminating'," Richard said. "Cops can screen for poison, idiot."

"It could be something that doesn't show up in toxicology. I saw it on TV."

"You wanna know what _I_ saw on TV? Ads for kids' volunteer clean-up programs that'd have you picking up trash with a sharp stick all summer long. Quit being a pain in my ass and _eat the toast._ "

Conan opened his mouth and shut it. He regarded the toast with the concentration of a scientist, turning it over in his hand a few times. When some of the powder fell off, he licked his forefinger and touched a smear of it on the plate, raising it to his mouth to test it. His eyebrows shot up.

Richard pretended not to watch him take a tentative bite off the corner. "This is… really good," Conan said slowly after he chewed and swallowed. He sounded cautiously surprised. "It's cinnamon-sugar, right?"

"Yeah."

"You had this just lying around?"

"Mixed it up a few years ago."

" _You_ made it?"

The continued disbelief, like Richard was somehow incapable of finding two ingredients to mix together without the aid of a kitchen Sherpa, nearly made him introduce Conan to the window for the second time that morning. "You trying to start something?"

"Why do you always think I'm _—_ " He heard Conan cut himself off with a quick, sharp breath of oxygenated Zen. "I was just surprised you had this lying around, okay? You have to admit it doesn't seem like the type of thing you'd usually… keep around. For you, I mean."

He'd be more interested in this conversation if he wasn't having so much trouble opening the cap on the carton of creamer. After a fourth failed attempt, Richard finally pulled his hand away to study it intently. "Did you used to make this for Rachel?" Conan asked from behind him, still vaguely in his sphere of concentration. "When she was a kid?"

He practiced the pinching motion and tried again. This time he managed to grip the cap long enough to turn it. "She never liked toast either," he muttered, distracted enough to answer honestly. He'd chalked his earlier tremor up to poor sleep or low blood sugar or both, but he'd nearly carved himself a new mouth trying to shave and getting the creamer into the mug was proving to be on par with neurosurgery, so evidently there was something else going on. "Camouflage helped."

"If she didn't like it, why not just buy something different?"

Richard's hand slipped, sending a trail of creamer over the side. Frustrated with himself, he snarled, "Here's an idea –why not just shut your trap for once in your life and be grateful for the free food you're taking from my real kid's mouth?"

The silence was titanic.

Richard swiped the towel from the oven handle to scrub at the spill. When he bent to catch the drip making a break for the lower cabinets, he was forced to brace himself on the counter when he realized the crawling nausea he felt in his intestines was guilt. It'd been so long since he'd felt an emotion that strong without a filter of a CNS depressant that his body had lost the ability to interpret it. He hurled the soiled towel back onto the counter and grabbed his coffee and tried to imagine a situation where a kid could show up that bruised and world-weary on his doorstep and not know how filling and cheap bread was, how fresh fruit and vegetables cost blood and no amount of pleading looks from his seven year-old daughter could buy her the expensive-ass cake she wanted in the shop window for her birthday.

Before he could break the silence – something not quite 'I'm sorry' but not exactly 'get out' either, Conan said, "Okay. I was just curious. I won't ask you that kind of stuff if you really don't want me to."

Richard didn't turn. He was on a fraying tightrope and a recoil could send him into space. "But for the record," Conan said, still in that bizarrely gentle, quiet tone that Richard knew for a fact wouldn't make it down the hall to the bathroom, "it's really kinda hard to ask me to trust you with the information _you_ want when you never give up anything about you. Just saying."

 _Little pissant piece of shit._ Richard took a drag on his mug and nearly combusted when another tremor knocked the scalding liquid over his upper lip. As if on cue, his own tension brought forth a sudden, hard twinge in his neck; fuming, Richard reached up to scrub the side of his fist along the encircling mark where Maya's wire had dug in. In his peripherals he saw Conan return to his toast, crunching noisily as though nothing at all had happened, leaving Richard to his own karmic stalemate.

Any plans he might've had to rectify the situation were derailed at the sound of the bathroom door opening again down the hall. Rachel re-entered the kitchen reeking of her curling iron and wearing the exact same hairdo she was sporting five minutes ago, once again proving that the money he vomited up at the electrical company was almost as pointless as sending actual vomit. "You made cinnamon toast?" Rachel blurted, instantly spotting the bottle on the counter. "Oh, come on, Dad, no fair!"

"Bottle's on the counter." Also _whatever._ He had things to do and ultimately that weirdness would have to wait on the to-do pile like everything else.

He stored his coffee mug inside the microwave because he was an asshole, then went to brush his teeth because he liked to be an asshole with fresh breath. "I'm bugging out," he reported, grabbing his jacket and keys from the back of the chair. "Lock up when you leave."

"Wait wait wait _wait._ " Rachel had been fishing out a can of fruit juice from the refrigerator. She now straightened in a hurry, sprinting after him and catching his sleeve just as he breached the threshold. "What do you mean, 'bugging out'? You're just going downstairs to work in the office, aren't you?"

"Sure," he said. "If by 'downstairs' you mean 'outside' and by 'work in the office' you mean 'snag three hot dates before noon'. You still have your mother's number, right? I haven't pissed her off yet this week, so make sure and pass that along if she tells you she's thinking about coming back."

"Dad, would you please be serious for two seconds?" Rachel snapped. "Where are you _really_ going?"

"Out. I've got things to do. Take your key with you, I don't know when I'll be back."

Rachel positioned herself squarely in front of him when he tried to wriggle past her. When he ducked she ducked, and he weaved and she weaved, and they continued the stupid dance until Rachel gave up and shoved him backwards over the threshold into the kitchen. "Look, I could ground you or whatever," Richard said, because most functional parents would probably do or say that after being manhandled by their offspring.

"If they're errands, why not just let me do them?" Rachel insisted. "I'll hit the store on the way home. Just make me a list like you usually do."

"I didn't make you a list because I'm not going to the store. Just drop it."

"What aren't you telling me? Why is it such a big secret?"

"It's not," Richard enunciated slowly, not so much trying to give her trouble as he was genuinely mystified by the fact that she was climbing up into his grill with an ice pick. "Look, just go to school or do whatever it is you usually do on a school day that you don't tell me about. All right? I'll see you when you get back."

Rachel seized his wrist as he once again tried to eel around her, and Richard was introduced to a technicolor galaxy of pain when his shoulder nearly popped right out of its goddamn socket. _Okay._ Richard spun on her to lend her a piece of his mind when she abruptly tackled him in a hug, whichactually was a pretty good strategy. It was one thing to upbraid your kid for their tantrum and another thing to do it when they were clinging to you like a scared cat. "Please, Dad." Rachel was muffled against his shoulder.

"What—" _the hell._ Truly baffled now, Richard gently tried to pry her off enough to get a look at her face. "Hon, seriously, what gives."

"Why don't you just stay around the office today like you always do? Whatever it is can't be that important. Let's just wait and do whatever you need to do after we get home from school. We can do it together. Like a… a family outing. Right, Conan?"

"Huh?" Clearly not invested whatsoever in the melodrama, Conan looked up with cheeks puffed with toast. "Wha?"

"That we can do together." Rachel pulled away of her own volition to fix Richard with round, expectant eyes. "Sound good, Dad?"

No it fucking didn't. Also _what._ Richard flailed around for an emotional buoy. Rachel's expression appeared composed, but the edges had gone pale, her nostrils flared in barely-suppressed anxiety.

Despite everything, Richard's mind stuttered and skipped backwards a bit at the sight of her distress. Was she still worried about… no, Yancy and Maya were behind bars. There was no chance of them getting out again after the enormous public outcry over the carelessness that allowed them to escape the first time. Rachel was rational enough to know that he wasn't in any more danger than he was yesterday or the week before that. Unless she was afraid someone would come after _her?_

That was probably the size of it, Richard realized. He generally shook off threats with the ease of someone who routinely drowned his worries in booze like fleas in a mop bucket. It hadn't occurred to him until now that Rachel might still actively be worried about retaliation from Yancy and Maya, but then again she hadn't had the years on the force he'd had to deal those hypothetical worries constructively.

In that moment, caught between a need to leave and a duty to stay, Richard felt a rare trickle of empathy. Bad enough she was stuck with him – she'd have even less success phoning up her mother, who was lousy at platitudes and impatient with paranoia. She'd been so harsh with Rachel over her fear of ghosts as a small child that Rachel had eventually bypassed her for comfort entirely, tiptoeing to Richard's side of the bed in the middle of the night and tugging on him silently until he woke. _They're back,_ would be all she'd say, and he'd haul his stupid ornery exhausted cop ass out of bed to spray down her room with monster repellant and handcuff invisible assailants until she got bored with her fear and fell back asleep with a thumb in her mouth.

 _I can't chase away everything, kid._ He extricated his arm but took her pointy face in his palm, and she reached up haltingly to settle her hand on his wrist. _Sometimes it's just you against the world and you're all out of monster spray._ "You think it's a good idea too, right, Dad?" Rachel pleaded, eyes on him.

"I think you're dangling over the edge like a spider about to run out of butt-silk," Richard said, but took her face in his other hand because he actually did give two fucks about this. "Rachel, look, you're gonna be fine. You're surrounded by people to and from school. Anyone bothers you, start kicking them in the crotch and don't stop until the cops get there to identify the body."

He heard Conan choke on his toast. As he'd hoped, Rachel flushed and regained some agency, smacking his hands away. "Dad,I'm being serious."

"Get it _real_ good in there. Use your toe."

" _Dad!_ "

"Just make sure to leave the teeth intact so they can run dental records," Richard told her over the sound of Conan's hacking. "When did this blushing damsel thing start, anyway? Did you lose a brawl at school or something? Do I need to come to school and dismantle some punk's clock?"

"Dad, I'm not _worried about me,_ " Rachel snapped. "I just don't think you should go out without backup for a while."

"Why not?"

"Because…" she floundered, the rallied hotly. "I just think it'd be better for you to lay low until everything is settled, and the media over the case dies down, that's all. Until there's… not so much attention on you."

 _Ohh._ Richard finally relaxed. So he'd misread after all. She wasn't so much afraid of him drawing more mooks out of the woodwork as she was that he'd make an ass of himself again on national television and embarrass her at school.

In all fairness that was probably a pretty legitimate complaint. At any rate he was far more equipped to deal with that than he was to protect her from every splatter of past, present, and future fear she sauteéd up in her pan of paranoia.

He played his part. "Hey, who do you think you're talking to? Maybe you haven't heard it enough lately, but you just so _happen_ to be the daughter of the famous detective Richard Moore, conqueror of assassins and conquistador of single ladies' hearts. Once I'm on a roll, I'm on a roll. There's nothing that can derail this man-train."

"Except three meters of wire," Conan muttered once he recovered, which actually did make Richard want to kill him kind of a lot. "Rachel, let's just go. Uncle's right. There's tons of pedestrians on the way there and back, and the school is safe. As long as we stick together, we'll be fine."

"Oh, Conan," Rachel sighed. She pushed away from them both and ran her hands through her hair. "I know. I know I'm being stupid. Maya and Yancy are behind bars. I just… I get so worried, and I just…"

"Are you worried about me?" Conan set his empty plate on the shelf and hopped off the stool, stumbling a bit on impact as though he'd miscalculated the distance to the floor. He recovered quickly and jogged across the room, shouldering his backpack before offering his hand up to Rachel. "Here I am! I was just pretending to be brave earlier. I'd be sooo scared if I wasn't with you, Rachel. Would it be okay if you protected me _?_ "

"You—" Richard's eyeballs nearly took a vacation from their sockets at the blatant emotional manipulation. "Now listen, you little—"

"I mean, you're a karate champion, right?" Conan's eyes were wide and earnest on a cherubic face. "There's no way you'd ever let anything get me while _you're_ there. You're way too tough."

Rachel's expression softened. She took a knee to get eye-level and firmly took Conan's hand in hers. "That's right," she said. "Nothing's getting between you and me, Conan."

"'Cuz you'd karate-chop them, right?"

"To tiny bits."

"Really tiny bits?"

"To _dust_."

"Whew!" Conan laughed. "Gee, I sure feel safe now. Hey, can we go to school now? I promised Amy I'd help her with her math before the bell rings and I sure don't want to be late."

"Then I guess we better get going." Rachel stood. Even in Richard's irritation he noticed that she didn't let go of Conan's hand, sliding her school bag from the counter with her free hand and glancing at the clock in passing. "Shoot, I didn't get around to packing a lunch last night. I guess I'll just buy some bread before class."

"Do you have money?" Conan was already digging in his pocket as they walked. "Here, why don't you take some of mine? I've got some leftover from yesterday. We can share."

"You are _not_ giving me your lunch money, young man." A tremor of laughter undercut Rachel's severity. "Honestly, you're such a little worrywart. If you have extra, why not save it? Or better yet, why not use it to buy your little friends something?"

"Because they'll just take it and waste it all at the arcade later. I learn from my mistakes, thanks."

"Really? Are you sure? Because I'd bet Amy would be reaaallyhappy to get something from you."

" _It's not_ _like that,_ " was Conan's fading protest, and a moment later the door to the stairs shut with a click, plunging the apartment into silence.

Richard stood in the center of the kitchen and tried to map out the exact point where Rachel had forgotten his existence in favor of latching onto Conan with the single-minded thirst of a wood tick. He had been almost one hundred percent sure he'd been doing halfway decent parenting that morning. She hadn't even looked over her shoulder at him as she'd left. He couldn't even remember the last time she'd—

A warning fluttered in his stomach. Suddenly dizzy again, Richard braced himself over the sink with both hands and closed his eyes and hated everything for a while, hated himself expertly and viscerally, until his defense mechanisms engaged and shelved everything he hated back into bottle-sized compartments, and gradually there came to be enough room inside his own chest for his lungs to expand again, to take in and then reject the same air.

When he could move again without stabbing something into the electrical socket, he straightened from the sink and made for the door.

* * *

.

He stopped by the convenience store before catching the bus on the last leg of the journey, opting to carry the snacks in an overstuffed pocket rather than fuss with a bag. Now that Beika was turning the corner towards the rainy season, the skies between the high-rises had a gun-metal glint that promised frequent inconvenience for anybody venturing outside without an umbrella.

By the time he'd made it downtown, the clouds had sneezed on him twice and the newspaper he'd ponied up for had ceased to function as a rain hat. He cleaned himself up in a coffee shop bathroom down the street, flirted outrageously until the blushing barista agreed to brew him a fresh pot, then scalded the fuck out of his tongue in order to finish it outside before he climbed the stairs to the station.

The police station was an epicenter of activity this time of morning, redolent of fresh coffee and the cleansers the janitors had used during last night's third shift. Richard spent a few minutes resenting his visitor's tag and wrestling back the urge to sneeze, feeling his now-warm stomach trying and failing to energize the sludge of blood in his cold limbs.

Meguire was sitting behind his desk when Richard came through the door to his office. He was listening intently into the phone receiver, lips quirked in a frown, fixating on the desk before him. His hard gaze flitted up when Richard knocked a knuckle on the doorframe; he mouthed _sorry_ and flicked his fingers in vague welcome toward the chair across from him.

Richard shut the door behind him with his heel. Fingertips prickling with slowly-returning warmth, he dug one of the packages of Krunky Wafers out of his pocket and tossed it ahead of him as he crossed the room. With barely a glance upward Meguire reached up to catch it one-handed, turning it over to check the label. A grin broke out over his face. "No, we understand," he said into the phone. He kicked himself back a bit and dug into his left-hand drawer; a moment later he surfaced with a package of Morinaga caramels that he slid across the desk. Pleased, Richard intercepted it and threw himself into the chair, picking an unoccupied corner of the desk to plop his heels up on. "And I can appreciate the disruption to your evenings, ma'am," Meguire said. "We're pretty familiar with that corner. I think it's probably an honest misunderstanding, but we'll check it out."

Richard's entire world was focused on opening the caramel's foil package like someone who wasn't a total dick. Already uncooperative to begin with, his cold fingers now fumbled over the tiny twists on each ends, fingertips skidding off the slippery material. By the time the twists finally surrendered and he was able to strip off the wrapping, he was tense enough with frustration that he fumbled the unwrapped caramel onto the dirt-streaked floor.

Meguire's hand shifted to cover the bottom of the receiver in time to muffle the hissed string of curses. He leaned back to access his drawer again and this time emerged with a bottled water. He peeled his palm off the receiver enough to say, "I understand," and plopped the bottle down in front of Richard with his other hand, crooking his fingers impatiently.

Richard shoved the bag of caramels over and took up the water instead. He downed a few medicinal swigs, swishing it over the burnt patch on his tongue as Meguire worked a caramel open with one-handed dexterity across the desk. "And I'm sorry for that," Meguire said, thrusting the unwrapped caramel into Richard's hand. A few seconds later a hard ball of foil flew to sting Richard between the eyes. "I can assure you that we'll look into it."

Richard shamelessly popped the caramel into his mouth and got to work on a second helping. Outside the window, a brief break in the clouds sent a tumble of sunlight into the room behind Meguire's desk, illuminating a shaft of dust motes. "You look like reheated roadkill," Meguire said when he finally hung up. "How many hours you running on?"

"More than you." The sugar in the caramel was helping to equalize something. Richard chewed as he pondered this development, untwisting the right side of the package with a slightly steadier hand. "What was all that?"

"Some skirt complaining about a neighbor's fussy dog on Third Avenue. She's a big annual donor at the police ball and apparently one of the grunts here blew her off last time, so she got wired over to me."

"That's the area with all the three story mansions packed up against the street, right? Usually all you get over there are stray cats setting off security systems."

"I guess the noise has been pretty egregious." Meguire snapped off a yawn with a grunt as he nudged the drawer by his knee closed. "I'll fling an officer out there this afternoon to see what's going on."

It had nothing to do with him and about ninety-six percent of his attention was invested in candy chews at the moment, but a greyed-out area of Richard's memory sent up a signal flare.

His chewing slowed. After he swallowed he said, "Deep bark?"

"She said it sounded like it was coming from a large dog." But Meguire filed one of the folders away and shot him a shrewd look. "Sounds like you know what's up. You saving me a trip?"

Third Avenue. Richard managed to peel the second wrapper off and toss it towards the trash. "She didn't happen to say it was coming from the Peterson's, did she?"

"Didn't drop any names. Why? You know them?"

"Rachel used to play with a German Shepherd over there when she was a kid. She still visits every now and then. Thing'd have to be almost eleven years old by now."

"Probably not the same dog," Meguire said. "All of those houses have yards big enough to park a yacht in. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them decided to breed a team of sled dogs to help them get to the mailbox. Don't bend any brain cells on this, Moore. Just a rich woman with a noise complaint."

Huh. Richard popped the next caramel in his mouth, chewed a while, and rolled the whole thing off his shoulders. "All right, let's get down to it." Meguire took a swig of coffee from his mug before unearthing a dog-eared manila folder and plopping it down between them. The printed label on the tab read YANCY, but handwritten scribbles underneath included a slew of further names and dates, with an all-capital addition on the bottom reading YANCY/REARDON/MOORE; REVISIT AND REFILE, INVESTIGATION ONGOING. Meguire dug into his package of Krunky Wafers and stored one between his teeth like a cigar as he fished around his desk for a pen.

When he appeared settled, he took the wafer from his mouth and announced presently, "Okay, shoot."

For the next twenty minutes Richard recounted all the details he could scrounge up leading to Yancy's and Maya's arrest, including a recap of the original case that'd put Yancy behind bars. Meguire remained quiet and nonjudgmental throughout, scribbling with shorthand and occasionally flipping to other documents in the file to add footnotes. He spoke up only a handful of times to clarify details that Richard glossed over, but for the most part Richard's report lined up with the statement he'd given at the scene. "You know, there is one thing that kind of sticks in my craw," Richard said at the end. "I mean, we'd spent the whole day pounding the pavement to help her. _Free of charge._ Got her to the hospital, escorted her around town, paid for her bus fare… who knows, without our help, she may never have gotten her memory back. You'd think she'd be grateful or something."

"Probably had nothing to do with you, Moore," Meguire said, scribbling down the last note before tossing the pen atop the paperwork with a sigh. He sounded tired but unusually tolerant, twisting to access his supply drawer again. He plucked Richard's empty water bottle from him and deposited a new one in front of him in the same motion. "Just business."

"'Didn't I deserve a _little_ karmic credit? I mean, she didn't even hesitate to try and kill me after all I did for her."

"Why should she? You were a mark and she'd already been paid. You meant nothing but a stack of bills to her, Richard."

"Maybe the problem here is that _you're_ not giving me enough credit," Richard said, mostly because he'd been Meguire's partner for too long to be fooled by the pointed cruelty. Meguire was on edge for him and was likely seeking to reduce Richard's role in the upcoming trial as much as possible, which would be rendered exponentially more difficult the more invested Richard became in deducing Maya's cup size. "For a woman who was supposed to be a professional assassin, she gave up prettyfast once the kids came on the scene. Personally, I think she'd fallen for me by that point and was looking for an excuse to tap out."

"Yeah, speaking of which." Meguire had swept up the pen again to earmark the pages. He paused and looked up now, gaze zeroing in on him. "Didn't want to interrupt your train of thought earlier, but we need to backtrack. You said something came out of the dark and hit her, right? Some kind of projectile?"

"Probably."

"What do you mean _probably._ "

"I don't know, I was busy. Ask Geppetto, she was the one yanking my strings."

"We did ask Geppetto, and now that you're off her strings you can be a big boy and answer my questions all by yourself," Meguire said. "Need you to dig deep and pull out every detail you can after the attack. It's important."

Having delivered his bit and being only mildly invested at this point, Richard stifled a yawn and bypassed the water to steal another caramel. His rain-damp collar kept brushing against his neck, giving him unpleasant little licks whenever he turned his chin. "Why."

"Because I asked you nicely."

"Look, Inspector, isn't this small potatoes? You already got the confession, the weapon, the motive, and proof the crime was premeditated. Shouldn't I at least be able to get in on the department's vision and dental package before I pony up any more work for free?"

"Rachel said you were awake when she got to you." Meguire didn't lobby back the antagonism. "You remember seeing or hearing anything unusual before then?"

"I don't know."

"Try harder. You were conscious enough to remember Maya dropping you, which meant you couldn't have been up there much more than thirty seconds. You said Conan came onto the scene right after that."

"I _don't know._ It happened fast, it was dark, I was dying. It's all scrambled together."

"Then take whatever time you need to unscramble it. I got nowhere else to be right now, Richard," Meguire said. "This time is blocked off for you. Just take a few minutes, think back. Anything you got, even if you think it means nothing."

Richard's chewing slowed to a stop as he finally cued into Meguire's tone. The questioning had taken on a timbre that he recognized from their days back on the force: calm and patient, almost gentle, every rough edge smoothed away so the direct attention soothed rather than scraped. It was the same tone Meguire used to coax witness statements from terrified children and hysterical drunk teenage girls. "I don't have anything for you."

"Think harder."

Suddenly and undeservedly irritated, Richard returned to the water bottle and broke the seal on the cap with a crack as rude as a curse. _Think harder._ He had been thinking. He'd done nothing but think for sixteen hours, too wired for alcohol and too short of breath to smoke. He'd knicked so many patches shaving that morning the sink had looked like a trench in the battle of Leipzig.

"Hey." Meguire had softened on the edge of Richard's periphery, and Richard realized he'd been gripping the water bottle hard enough to make it crackle. "It's all right. Just take your time."

"Quit handling me," Richard snapped. He took an unsteady swig of water to quiet his nausea. "I'm not traumatized, I just don't have what you want."

"I'm not handling you, I'm trying to pry a witness statement from your stubborn ass without contributing to your laundry list of psychological damage," Meguire said. "I've got conflicting reports from three different parties. Maya, Conan, Rachel, they all say they saw something different. You were the only one there the whole time who can confirm their stories, so – yeah, Richard, you know what, I guess I am handling you. I'm trying to dig deep and not draw blood doing it."

"You secured a confession already, why does this matter?"

"When we questioned him on the scene, Conan said that he threw some debris to distract her and she accidentally dropped you. But when Rachel got there, she said Maya was on the ground because she was too injured to get up to finish the job."

"Probably just fell on her."

"Which'd be fine, except the witness statements don't corroborate the evidence," Meguire said. "Maya said you were heavier than she'd expected and you fought back so hard that she lost her grip on you. No mention of a projectile or Conan. When we pushed her on it, she said she didn't get up to finish the job because she didn't want to off you in front of your kids."

"Fine, then that's what happened."

"Damn it, Richard, you're not this stupid," Meguire said. "She's a professional – in the business for years. She had your full dossier in that drawer, you think she didn't know your weight down to the gram ahead of time? Even if she somehow screwed that up, your neck and her hands would be sliced to ribbons if you'd actually fought her hard enough to make her drop you, and that ain't even pulling in the physics of it."

"Fine, then she's full of crap," Richard said. "I don't get what you're after."

"You want to know what I'm after?" Meguire exploded suddenly, slamming his pen down. "I'm trying to get you to give a damn about the fact someone tried to kill you the other day. I'm trying to scrape up enough evidence to punish the person who wanted you dead. You were attacked by an assassin, the police showed up a few minutes later, and the time between those two events is a giant goddamn brick wall directly up my snagged you in the middle of that room, Moore. Nothing for you to pull on, push off, or drag yourself up or down with. Medical said she had four cracked ribs – no damage to her hands to show that you fought her. Something hit her with the force of a battering ram and only Conan was around to see it happen, and he's clammed up tighter than a nun. No seven year-old can throw a projectile with that much force, and Rachel said she didn't do it, so what I'm _after_ is how the hell you're lucky enough to be alive right now when _by all accounts we should've been too late._ "

A curt rap rattled the glass on the door behind him. Stunned into speechlessness, hand frozen atop the next caramel, Richard pried his gaze away in time to see a woman from Meguire's team poke her head into the office. Kay gave Richard an expert once-over before directing her brisk, tight-lipped smile over to Meguire. "It's fine," Meguire muttered, almost sullen, sweeping wafer crumbs and empty candy wrappers towards the trash can. His ire had died the moment she'd come in. "He's not bleeding."

"I'd never suggest something so disrespectful, sir." Kay's cheerful voice held a touch of flint. Richard recognized it as the same sweet tone his wife used to course-correct his conduct in front of guests instead of ripping him a new asshole and leaving him to bleed out in a dense forest. "I was just checking to see if you or the civilian witness you're questioning would like some tea to drink."

"No thank you."

"Sorry, I should've known you'd have no need for that. The whole team admires what a level head you keep even in tense situations, like when a civilian victim of a violent assault is giving a witness statement here at the police station, where we protect civilians."

Meguire propped his elbows on the desk and hid his face in his hands. "Got it."

"I just wanted to tell you how happy I am to hear, sir, clear down the hallway and all the way up to the front desk, how enthusiastic you are about our oath to serve and protect civilians."

Meguire's face sank further against the tent of his fingertips. " _Got it_."

Kay hoisted the blinds all the way to the top of the door's window. She made sure the latch was unlocked, gave Richard a sunny smile, and closed the door behind her. The wedge of rolled-up blinds clacked against the glass before the room fell into silence once more.

The sweetness of the caramel abruptly became cloying. Richard drew his hand away and took up his water instead, collecting a mouthful and swishing it between his teeth to try to dislodge the crust of sugar. Across the desk, Meguire continued his steady collapse inward, shoulders hunching, thumbs massaging his eyebrows and blocking his expression from view. The posture radiated fatigue.

Suddenly subdued, Richard fixed his gaze on the bottle in his hands. There'd actually been a point in fairly recent history that it wouldn't have occurred to him to care about the inconvenience he was causing the department. Richard had been a licensed distributor of Grade-A unsalted horseshit for years. Karmic retribution was a given. As long as he could tuck his trauma in at night with a blanket of liquor and a wish upon a fuck-off star, the issue of whether the pain was actually _fair_ or not was really beside the point. If he dealt it, he needed to be able to take it.

The problem was, Richard realized slowly, digging in a thumb until the water inside the bottle crept up around the indentation — the problem was, the pain from Maya's betrayal wasn't karmic. It was scented and softer and more invasive, creeping in with the nihilism that spidered all over him when he lay in bed after a binge. Had he tried to take advantage in some way, _any_ way, he'd have deserved what'd gone down that night. Genuinely doing his best to help someone in need and getting the exact same result… that was different. It hurt differently.

Some rusty gear in his head finally clucked forward a notch. Richard blinked at the bottle, letting his mind travel back through the mire, plucking out glints of incidental light. Gravel under his heel. The silvery note of the wire as it cinched around his neck. _This is different._ This was pain he hadn't earned.

Meguire was slowly massaging his eyebrows across the desk. "I—" Richard stopped. He thumbed his own forehead a minute, trying to bum-rush his thought process through his headache. The improbable strength in Maya's delicate arms as she hoisted him off the ground. Thick cobwebs. Steel support beams. "Now that I think about it, maybe there was something else."

Meguire kept silent, but one of his hands pulled away from his face, finding his pen. "I don't think she was hurt before she roped me." Richard kept the scene on loop in his head. "Nothing wrong with her at the hospital other than the amnesia – they'll have records on it. And she rolled right back up after she dodged the car, not a scratch. The hotel should've caught it on surveillance. She used her weight to pull me up at the warehouse, but she kept a good stance after she did it. She couldn't have done that with busted ribs. I was already out of breath chasing her, so I didn't have much left to fight her with."

Meguire had muted his presence to the whisper of his pen across the paper. Richard lost himself in the refracted colors in the water bottle, flinging his net as far out over the sea of his disjointed memories as it'd go for free. "I was almost out when she dropped me. Didn't see a projectile, but I was in the middle of the room – she had to cop a wide angle to have the leverage to hold me. No way I fell on her. Someone had to have thrown something."

Meguire finally did stir at this, but very quietly. "Conan?"

"He was the first one there, but there's no way he could've thrown anything with that much force."

"How about kicking something? Was there anything around he could've used?"

"No seven year-old kicks hard enough to blow out four ribs unless he's a magical girl."

"Lot of debris. A good chunk of concrete could've done a lot of damage, even thrown by a kid."

Maybe. It was plausible but it wasn't. There was something he was missing. "Which hotel?" Meguire said, reaching for the phone.

"Grand Hotel on Main."

Meguire put in the call.

His daughter's screams. His heartbeat slowing in his ears as he swung above an abyss three feet under his shoes. Impact. The taste of blood. Policemen standing over him. Conan on his knees, cold little fingers grazing Richard's neck as he quickly searched for any remnants of wire.

Richard froze, replaying the scene with fresh eyes. Rachel had clung like carpet lint to him afterwards, refusing to submit to questioning until the medics had cleared him. Conan had taken a wider orbit, handling the lion's share of the witness statement, but his gaze had kept flitting over to keep track of them as the cluster of cops and reporters had thickened. The more Richard thought about it, the more he recognized Rachel's strange behavior that morning as being an echo of her hysteria at the crime scene.

She wasn't worried for herself or Conan, Richard realized, dumbfounded. She was afraid for _him._ And Conan… he'd actually talked to Maya, hadn't he? Not long enough to get himself garroted, but plenty long enough for her to knock him off-kilter in other, more insidious ways. Maybe enough for him to nearly blow his cover over something as asinine as a piece of stolen toast. "I'm gonna be straight with you," Meguire said as he hung up the phone. "The prosecution's got their work cut out for them on this one. I can't tell you one way or another how this is all gonna play out."

Buried somewhere underneath the rest of it, sardonic and blurred with pain as the sirens closed in: _you're a force to be reckoned with, little man._ "You in there?" Meguire said.

Richard blinked his way out of his daze. "The judicial system's gonna take it easy on her because she's young and pretty and knows how to cry without running her mascara," Meguire said. "The reason I'm yanking so hard for your statement is because more than likely, her lawyer's going to claim she wasn't actually trying to kill you."

"Really?"

"It's a long shot, but it's got roots," Meguire said. "Because no one'll pony up as to how _exactly_ she got hurt, there's no proof Conan or Rachel or anyone else threw something to knock her off-balance enough to drop you. Any lawyer worth a damn is going to play that up for all they've got. Hundred to one they argue that she had a crisis of conscience and let you go at the last minute – maybe use the 'nurturing female' angle and say that she didn't want to kill you in front of your kid."

"He's not my—"

"I don't care, shut up," Meguire said. "Worst case scenario, the lawyer claims _you_ assaulted _her,_ and she broke out her wire in self-defense to get you to stop chasing her. That's more far-fetched considering her criminal past, but it's not completely out of the ballpark."

Oh. Richard's head still hurt and the buzz from his coffee had long worn off. He also had an increasing urge to pee that was encroaching upon the gravity of the conversation. "Luckily," Meguire said, "it seems like Maya's connection with Yancy's gonna be the thing that dooms her in the end. They're both ratting on each other enough that your case might end up being just a drop in the bucket."

"Then what was the point of this?" Richard asked, freshly irritated to be out of bed with a bladder full of distilled non-alcoholic beverages. "If that's all this'll come down to, you already had everything you needed from me back at the crime scene."

"On the assumption that I _don't_ care enough about you to make sure your would-be murderer can't get at you again? I guess nothing, dipshit," Meguire said. "Or if you want to look at the legal angle, I owe it to the courts to make sure the list of her crimes is comprehensive enough that they can get the whole picture when sentencing her. She didn't actually off you, so now we got a grey area for the defense to exploit."

"If it makes things easier, you can always let her out and have her try again." Either way he'd checked out of the conversation. Richard officially devoted his concentration to more pressing matters, like whether or not to pocket a modest handful of caramels or take off with the entire bag as payment for services rendered. "Hopefully next time she gets it right and leaves more evidence for the department to work with."

Meguire had picked the pen back up to start dating the entries. He paused at this, scratching the back of his ear slowly with the capped end.

When he spoke it was sudden and resigned. "So you're just gonna leave that floating there?"

"What."

"That was a cry for help, Dick."

"Huh?" Richard froze with a fistful of caramels. "No it wasn't."

"It sure as hell was and it wasn't the first one, so if your plan _isn't_ for me to interpret it that way, I'd suggest amending it real quick."

" _I wasn't—_ " Richard resisted the urge to prove Meguire's point by drowning himself in the remaining four centimeters of water in his bottle. "I was joking."

"Oh yeah?"

"It was a joke."

"Don't hand me those kinds of jokes unless you want me to do something about them." Meguire scribbled down a handful of signatures, then thrust the documents across the desk to Richard and tossed the pen after them. "This. _This_ is a joke. How the hell do we even file this. I'm gonna have to start sending fruit baskets down to Personnel."

"You think you're maybe sounding off in the wrong direction?" Richard activated his professionalism long enough to give the documents a once-over before committing his signatures to them. "Kudo's rubbernecked over half of Beika's crime scenes and I don't see you dragging him in here to henpeck his ear off over it."

"I would if anyone could find him," Meguire said grimly, which did take the wind out of Richard's sails a little. "But even if I could get my hands on him, the kid isn't a veteran of the department, a component in an internal investigation, a police consultant, _and_ a victim of multiple assaults at the same time. You're your own pain in the ass, Richard."

"Am I a rich pain in the ass?" His spring of optimism made a quick detour in from his sea of eternal pessimism. Meguire looked tired but not especially irritated, which usually meant he could at least be plied to foot the bill for some takeout. "I _did_ help you guys catch a dangerous criminal assassin. There's some sort of bonus for that, right?"

Meguire collected the assembly of crumpled-up wrappers in lieu of a response. When Richard was done signing his last initial, Meguire stole the pile and filed it all back into its dog-eared folder, which he then locked into the drawer by his knee. Business apparently concluded, he heaved himself up with a sigh, cricked his spine, and fished his jacket up from the back of his chair. "Let's get you out of here before we start running into the lunch rush. We can leave out back."

Already seeking out a third handful of caramels and mostly expecting dismissal via catapult at this point, Richard blinked up at him. "You're loaning me a squad car?"

"Driving you home. C'mon."

"You're working."

"Already scheduled this in. Figured whatever night you were coming off of didn't need two stints on public transportation to top it off."

As it always did, the kindness abruptly exhausted him. Richard released the caramels and instead dedicated a minute to scrub his eyes as his bladder whined at him with knives. "This was a rough one, Moore," Meguire said. "Got my own hackles up, if I'm gonna be honest."

It wasn't a question. "Eva called you."

"Your kid did, 'bout twenty minutes before you came in. Wanted to check to see if you got here."

How did she even— He dropped his hand and hovered between mystified and murderous. "I told her to _get off my back_."

"Didn't say it was Rachel."

The anger faded into something a little colder, a little more sinuous. Richard drummed the side of his thumb against the desk restlessly. "C'mon." Meguire didn't wait for him to sort it out. He dug his keys from his pocket and tossed a caramel at Richard in passing, who caught it with his ear. "Stew all you want at home, but at least give me the peace of mind to know I didn't let you ferment in a bar on the way there."

* * *

.

Richard managed to make it all the way through a restaurant take-out line and escape out the car in front of the agency before Meguire said, "One more thing."

"Look, this isn't going to be one of those dramatic last-minute stingers that keep me up all night, is it?" Richard asked, bracing a reluctant hand atop the car to get eye-level. "Just split some of the take-out with me and give me a running start while you chew."

"This case put Conan back on the radar at the department. I've tried to keep it quiet, but noses sharper than mine have started sniffing around it. It's probably only a matter of time before the department starts spending resources on it."

"Are they putting snipers on it too? I know where he sleeps."

"Dunno how much longer he's got, Moore," Meguire said simply. "He was safe with you and Agasa vouched for his identity, so other cases took priority, but the more of this kind of stuff he gets mixed up in, the more questions are gonna get asked."

His takeout was getting cold. Propped against the car with a still-damp jacket and a tickle climbing up his nose, Richard found himself wishing that congealed teriyaki sauce was the only thing life had served him today atop the usual pile of steamed bullshit. "So what."

"You and I both know it takes something pretty screwy to drive a seven year-old into hiding. Keeping him safe was enough for a while, but sooner or later the truth's gotta come out. He's on borrowed time."

" _So what._ "

"Don't give me so what, asshole," Meguire said. "You want him out so bad, throw him out. I'll pick him up right now. He'll be in the department inside an hour and in the system before the day's out."

Richard imagined his rice matting inside the bag. The omni-present drizzle was starting to intensify again into rain, rewetting the fabric around his neck. "You want to bluff, don't do it with someone who knows firsthand how piss-poor you gamble," Meguire said. "Help him keep his head down. Don't let him get mixed up in anything for a while. Just… give me time to try to work it out on my end."

"Why are you breaking a sweat over this?"

"I got bigger things on my plate than spending tax dollars ousting a kid from a good foster assignment just because it's not on the books. One way or another, we got nothing on him yet. Until we do, I'm just as happy skipping the middleman."

God damn it. Richard let go of the car and fisted the damp hair off his neck. "I'm heading back in," Meguire said. "Try to take it easy. I'll get back to you if anything pops up over the case."

He wondered how much paperwork it'd be to go back and finish the job Maya had started over at the construction site. Probably at least a few pages. "Is my check in the mail yet?"

"You're welcome for your lunch," Meguire said, and left Richard behind in a puff of exhaust that quickly dissipated in the rain.

… the teriyaki was actually pretty good cold.


End file.
